


vivere ut edas

by Chubstilinski



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater, The Dreamer Trilogy - Maggie Steifvater
Genre: Accidental Bondage, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Belly Kink, Belly Rubs, Body Image, Body Worship, Chubby Adam Parrish, College Student Adam Parrish, Established Relationship, Exhibitionism, Feeding, Feeding Kink, Food Kink, Food Sex, Hand Feeding, Insecurity, Introspection, Kink Exploration, Lack of Communication, M/M, Only the most minor of cdth spoilers and nothing that wasn’t in the sampler, Ronan Lynch's Hand Kink, Situational Humiliation, Soft Adam Parrish, Soft Ronan Lynch, Stuffing, Weight Gain, Weight Issues, this is all just really very soft, wink wink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-02-16 19:53:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21503521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chubstilinski/pseuds/Chubstilinski
Summary: He bit into the burger and considered that he never used to be the kind of person who would eat something if he didn't need it, just because it tasted good, but that had clearly changed.He wasn't hungry, but he wanted to eat, so he did.And Ronan could barely keep his eyes on the road. Adam didn't know what was so distracting about just watching him eat, but the more time he spent running similar experiments, the more Adam was convinced that Ronan liked it.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 42
Kudos: 173





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a substantial amount of this before I read the Opal short story and cdth so uh this is a canon divergent au I guess with like cherry picked random stuff from each, depending on whether or not I felt like changing what I had already written lmao.
> 
> For instance, I took some liberties with Ronan's dreaming problems post-TRK, and by that I mean he doesn't have them... Also I know Adam probably isn't beholden to cabeswater/lindenmere any longer but he is here. It's for fun and sexy reasons so like just go with it.
> 
> The tiny sun thing is just a weird coincidence though.
> 
> Many thanks to [sublime_jumbles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sublime_jumbles/pseuds/sublime_jumbles) for the help!!
> 
> (PS I don't actually know latin so if the title makes no sense that's why and please help me fix it lmao)

The winter after everything, Adam spent a lot of time at the Barns. The main house was perpetually cozy and warm inside, the grounds idyllic with impossible snowstorms that never managed to reach outside the rolling hills and woods that surrounded Ronan’s childhood home. The two of them were nearly inseparable for those first few weeks, the need for comfort pressing hard on them both. 

Comfort came through touch, through countless lazy hours spent with just each other, through fires and dream-soft pyjamas and an overwhelming amount of food. 

The holiday season in particular felt like a never-ending feast—there were Solstice celebrations and then Christmas Eve dinner at 300 Fox Way, Gansey’s parents’ house for Christmas Day, and back to the Barns for dinner. The whole week, maybe two, passed in a haze of lavish meals, treats, and extravagant leftovers. 

Adam tried not to be bothered by it—to receive these gifts gracefully, and it helped that he wasn’t the only one receiving them, but it still gnawed at him, a little. They all pushed food at him anyway, heedless of any protests Adam made, so each event ended with a full, satisfied belly and multiple tupperwares filled with leftovers. 

Ronan pushed food at him, too, and not just over the holidays. He was more subtle about keeping Adam fed, but by far the most relentless. 

Sometimes he cooked simple, hearty meals. More and more, he’d started to bring treats for Adam out of his dreams—whimsical, delicate pastries and strange-looking sweets, each more delicious than the last. 

In the beginning, Ronan had been very good at getting Adam to eat, nearly without realizing how much he was putting away. Without knowing he’d been given a gift until it was too late. He was sneaky about keeping Adam’s plates full and distracting enough that he could get away with it easier than Adam wanted to admit. 

If he didn’t know Ronan like he did, Adam might’ve assumed he didn’t even care whether he ate this food or not. When he offered something, he had a way of making it seem like it was incidental rather than the whole point. That he just  _ happened _ to dream this concoction perfectly tailored to Adam’s tastes, or that he just  _ happened _ to make a metric fuck-ton of spaghetti right before Adam got home from work, and “You might as well eat the rest, Parrish, I don’t feel like putting all that shit away.”

Adam caught himself succumbing to these techniques more than he should have. Not least of all because when he did, if he paid attention, he could see how much it pleased Ronan—how much he wanted it—in the little smile behind his eyes, in the way the offering was a little hesitant and a lot affectionate. 

It was an even more impressive skill, Adam thought, to get him to give in even after realizing what he was up to, but Ronan managed that flawlessly, too. 

***

Adam was sinking into the cloudlike, fluffy cushions of the living room couch, one hand clasped around his belly. He was more full than he remembered ever being in his life, stuffed with generous helpings of assorted holiday leftovers from three different feasts. Calla’s buttery sausage stuffing and Maura’s rosemary chicken and Ronan’s cheesy mashed potatoes and a gourmet apple crumble pie from the Ganseys. Green bean casserole, sweet potato with marshmallows, honey-roasted ham. 

He was warm in front of a crackling fire, sated and drowsy. Something heavy dropped onto his stomach and he groaned. 

Ronan flung himself over the back of the couch and into the space next to him. Adam cracked his eyes open and took in the sight of the plate on his belly heaped with a dozen gingerbread cookies dusted with sparkling sugar, so bright they almost seemed to glow. 

“What,” Adam said. 

“It’s fucking dessert, Parrish.”

Adam shot him a look and sat up so he could place the plate on the coffee table, but Ronan snatched it out of his hand. Adam said, “I’m still full from dinner, I don’t think—“

He looked down at the cookies and his voice trailed off. They were familiar shapes, crudely decorated but unmistakable in their likenesses. The first gingerbread man was squarish, with glasses and a salmon-colored polo shirt. The one beside it was about half its size and darker in color, wearing a dress made from at least three different colors of frosting, globbed into strange shapes and sprinkled with chunks of sugar glitter and what looked like tiny pearls. 

A violent laugh jumped suddenly from Adam’s mouth. “Jesus, did you make these?” 

“Who else would have? Opal? Chainsaw?”

Adam trailed a fingertip across the edges of the cookies at the top of the pile, before giving in and taking a conservative bite. 

He discovered that they weren’t gingerbread cookies at all, despite their appearance, and each one tasted a little different—flavors that somehow corresponded so perfectly to the people they represented, that Adam could barely contain his grin even through mouthfuls of food.

He spent an hour solid examining every cookie before eating them one by one. Gansey’s tasted like mint and something flowery. Blue’s was sharp, spiced with nutmeg and ginger. Henry’s was topped by a tower of frosting hair and it tasted like tangy oranges and smooth honey. Ronan’s had an exaggerated scowl and tasted dark and rich and sweet like chocolate and molasses. Adam’s own likeness was shirtless with coveralls pooled around his waist. Adam rolled his eyes, the effect of it probably ruined by the smile he couldn’t seem to wipe off his face. He tasted like caramel apples and biting cinnamon. 

There was a gingerbread Declan and Matthew and the women of 300 Fox Way. Towards the bottom of the pile, there was a cookie shaped like a ghost holding a skateboard. Adam felt something catch in his throat. Noah’s cookie tasted airy and sweet, so light on his tongue he could barely grasp it before it melted away. 

After the cookies were gone, Adam felt the inexplicable sense of all of them, a dull awareness like they were in the room with him. He was warm and massively overfull—still an unfamiliar feeling after a lifetime of unending hunger. Guilt warred inside of him for a moment, but it was lost in sugary kisses and Ronan’s gentle palm soothing his stomach. 

***

January saw Adam returning to Aglionby. 

Ronan had slept over at St. Agnes, and he was spread-eagle across Adam’s mattress, feigning sleep while Adam got ready for school. 

After a quick, lukewarm shower, he went to get dressed. He heard Ronan stir and he felt eyes on him as he pulled up his uniform khakis. 

Adam felt smug and self-satisfied about being watched until something caught him off guard. It took somewhat more tugging to get the pants up to his waist than it usually would have. His first thought was that he must have shrunk them at the laundromat, despite how careful he always was. He was annoyed at himself for as long as it took to put on his shirt, tuck it in, and button his pants. 

Abruptly, he realized what the problem actually was. He looked down, ears flaring with heat. The pants pinched at his waist and a tiny, barely-there belly pushed out from his middle. Adam prodded one index finger into his stomach and it sunk into a thin layer of softness. 

He didn’t dare check if Ronan was still watching, and he stepped up to the full length mirror that had come attached to the back of the bathroom door to take in his reflection. 

Adam was confronted by the sight of an unmistakably rounded stomach. It was barely anything. Experimentally, he sucked in, and with very little effort managed to hide it entirely from view. 

He was bloated, he thought, from being so carelessly overindulgent, spending so much time hiding away with Ronan. 

On the days when Adam hadn’t had work, when they had nowhere else to be, they could barely be bothered to put on clothes, and when they had, more often than not, they just wore sweatpants and t-shirts. Adam’s work and leisure clothes were loose and forgiving, anyway, but his Aglionby uniform was tailored, fitted, and as precise as he could manage on his meager budget. 

Belted and with his shirt and sweater over top, the slight curve of his belly was barely visible, even with his muscles relaxed, but he felt a faint twinge of embarrassment, anyway. That omnipresent fear of not belonging. The dollar signs behind his eyes when he thought of maybe having to buy a new uniform. 

No, he wouldn’t need to. It wouldn’t come to that. 

Ronan crept up behind him before Adam even noticed that he’d gotten up. He flung Adam’s tie around his neck, tugging him until he was close enough to plant a quick kiss on his lips. He pulled back and crossed one side of the tie over the other, practiced and sure, said, “Morning. You ready to get back to that fucking hellhole you love so much?” 

Adam didn’t quite laugh, but a breath shot out of his nose, a fraction of one. He didn’t love it as much as it was a necessity, and if he could, he would stay right here, with Ronan, for as long as he could manage. 

“Not really,” he admitted. 

He watched Ronan’s fingers work, with fascination. He wouldn’t have guessed Ronan even knew how to tie a tie properly, but it was expertly knotted around Adam’s throat in seconds. He tucked it into the v-neck of his sweater, reached under the hem to smooth it down his chest and over his belly. Adam froze. 

Without meeting his eyes, Ronan slipped behind him, wrapped his arms around Adam’s waist and hid his face in the crook of Adam’s neck. He didn’t say anything, and they stood there for a few moments before Ronan started to place little kisses against his skin. Adam released a breath. 

Ronan stroked his hands over Adam’s sides. Adam wondered if it bothered him that he was going to be alone while they were all at school, that maybe it was finally hitting him the way it had hit Adam yesterday, that his days were going to feel strangely bereft without Ronan’s insolent, obnoxious presence in their shared classes, between them, at lunch. It was pathetic to miss someone you were going to see nearly every day anyway, so Adam shoved the feeling aside. 

Ronan was still hiding, though, and unusually still—his attention lingering just long enough against the newly softened planes of Adam’s waist and midsection that he registered it as significant. Ronan was being careful in that way he only got with something important. 

He was being careful with Adam’s feelings, probably, which should have annoyed him, but despite himself, Ronan’s touch made the stress of the morning leech out of him. 

In the mirror’s reflection, Ronan met his eyes, and his face was guarded—that deliberately affected non-expression he’d often worn in the months before he kissed Adam for the first time. 

Adam leaned back into him and Ronan tensed, flexed his fingers into Adam’s sides. His hips canted away from Adam’s ass. A flush had worked its way across his cheeks, and his breath was deep and slow and tenuously controlled against his skin. 

_ Oh, _ Adam thought. He reached back and rubbed his hand over the back of Ronan’s head, fingers scratching through soft stubble, pushed a little so Ronan’s face was buried in his neck, again, and then he waited. He let Ronan tell him with his hands, with his mouth, exactly what he wanted to know. 

It was the way his hands stayed within such a narrow range of space, restrained rather than roaming, eager to touch as much of Adam as he could. It was a hitch of breath when Adam relaxed the flex of his abdominal muscles when he felt Ronan’s fingertips stray close enough to feel it. 

Ronan was trying to project an air of casual touch, but Adam had been gifted with enough of his casual touches by now that this stood out to him clearly, glaring in its discrepancy. He was coiled behind Adam, vibrating with the need to strike. 

Maybe it was simple—he wanted to have sex, but knew Adam had to be at school soon and was being considerate by not initiating anything. Adam doubted it. It wasn’t that Ronan wasn’t considerate, but he was considerate in a very particular way, and it did not include anything like this. Ronan was always happy to tease Adam, to rile him up at the most inconvenient of times. 

Adam couldn’t have told anyone why he thought it might have been something else, something more, but he couldn’t shake the feeling. The certainty. And he was sure that Ronan didn’t know how obvious he was being, how thoroughly Adam could read him, now, and he knew better than to point it out. 

His fingers stroked over Adam’s middle and his eyelashes fluttered against his throat. Adam was getting swept up in it, despite the fact that he couldn’t afford to be late. Maybe he could afford this—one last moment of easy comfort. 

He looked at the two of them in the mirror and found his eyes caught on the protrusion of his belly underneath his sweater, Ronan’s hands framing it gently, appreciatively. Something was starting to simmer, hot and wild with potential, just from the sight of them wrapped in each other, the feeling of Ronan’s hands, his lips. 

Adam considered, then, just how he’d gotten this way. And he considered that, to the best of his knowledge, the Ronan from even just last year would have never cooked anything substantial for himself, or even for Gansey, in the kitchen/bathroom/laundry room of Monmouth Manufacturing. This past month, Ronan had been cooking for  _ Adam,  _ keeping him well fed because he wanted to. 

It was possible that Ronan enjoyed the physical reminder of it, the evidence of his care etched into Adam’s body. 

Adam felt warm—not from embarrassment, anymore, but from an emotion he didn’t know how to name. 

Maybe a little holiday weight wasn’t so bad. It was definitely a first. He’d probably lose it, anyway. 

***

Adam had just gotten off work from a shift at the factory. He was shivering uncontrollably on the bike ride to Nino’s in the bitter winter chill. Hunger was gnawing a hole in his stomach. He had ten dollars in his pocket, and he should have known better than to spend it on something as ephemeral as one meal, but right now, he was willing to part with if it meant he’d get his fill of pizza. 

He locked up his bike and went inside. It was crowded enough that he had trouble weaving through to get to their booth. 

Henry saw him first. He waved him over and said, “Ah, Parrish! Nice of you to finally join us.” On anyone else it might have sounded sarcastic, but from Henry it just sounded genuine. 

Ronan turned his head around to look at him and a private smile lit his eyes as he slid over to make room, leaving his arm draped across the back of the seat

Gansey held out a fist for Adam to bump when he’d reached the table. He said, “How was work?” 

Adam shrugged noncommittally and collapsed into the booth, into Ronan. He grabbed a garlic knot out of his basket and said, “Fine.”  _ Exhausting. Terrible. _

They resumed a conversation that Adam couldn’t follow. He took a big bite of his garlic knot and let himself relax into the familiarity of Nino’s and his friends’ voices and Ronan’s body heat. 

Blue came by with a pitcher of iced tea and a basket of breadsticks looking surly, her hair somehow more dishevelled than usual. “Hey, Adam,” she said, and then to the rest of the table, “Some assholes sent these back to the kitchen for being ‘too cold,’ do you guys want them?” 

Ronan snatched the basket and dragged it to his side of the table. “Yup.” 

“You’re  _ welcome. _ ”

Ronan shot her a shit-eating grin. “Thanks, maggot.”

Adam touched one of the breadsticks and looked up at her in disbelief. They were nicely warm, still, Adam thought. 

Blue rolled her eyes, but not at him. She said, “I  _ know. _ ” Gansey took Blue’s hand and kissed her knuckles and she scolded him, “I’m at work,” but melted so obviously when his lips touched her skin that Adam hoped to god he didn’t look like that when Ronan did that to him. 

He ate a breadstick, Blue checked on her other tables, and then he ate another. Ronan’s arm snaked around his shoulders. He leaned back into it and reached for another one of Ronan’s garlic knots before he could think to stop himself. 

Some Pavlovian response to Ronan’s presence made him eat more than he should, he thought. His eyes flicked to Ronan’s in time to catch him staring and a smirk light his face. Adam elbowed him. 

Blue brought over their new usual—two large deep dish pizzas, one sausage for Adam and Ronan, and one half avocado and half Hawaiian for Gansey and Henry. Between them, they usually devoured both. Gansey and Henry’s would be evenly split, Adam would take one slice from Ronan’s pizza, two if he thought he could afford it—if he was too hungry to be able to get by on just one. He never ate more than two. Ronan would finish it off by the end of the evening, usually back at Monmouth, but sometimes all at once, right here at Nino’s, where Adam could watch him do it with a churning mixture of envy and affection. How Ronan could eat like that and not gain weight was baffling, infuriating. 

Today, Adam took a third slice, hoping that no one would notice but Ronan, who had spent the better part of the night so far trying not to look at him and mostly failing. 

But, of course, nothing ever worked out quite like Adam hoped. Henry said, “My, my, Parrish, I must say I have not seen you eat quite so much, before. Tough day?”

“Just hungry, I guess.”

Ronan threw a garlic knot at Henry, who yelled and batted it away from his face. It landed on the floor and Adam would have been more pissed about the waste of food if he weren’t focusing all of his energy trying to look like he wasn’t embarrassed. 

“Lynch,” Gansey reprimanded. 

“Dick,” Ronan shot back. 

Henry tore a breadstick into bite-sized pieces and threw one at Ronan’s face. Ronan caught it in his mouth and grinned. 

They took turns throwing food at each other until Blue noticed from across the restaurant and yelled at them to stop. At least most of it had made it to Ronan’s mouth. The same could not be said of Henry. Adam snatched the last garlic knot before Blue turned her back and Ronan wasted it. 

His stomach was heavy with what had to be  _ pounds _ of cheese and bread, but he caught himself eyeing the remaining two tantalizingly thick, greasy slices on the tray between him and Ronan. Adam was no stranger to want, especially the wanting of food, but somehow, it was difficult to ignore, now, in a way that it never used to be. 

He knew he couldn’t quite afford to pay for half a pizza plus sweet tea and appetizers, just like he knew no one would call him out on it when he put his crumpled ten dollar bill on the table at the end of the meal. They probably wouldn’t even notice a discrepancy that would have been obvious to Adam. 

He also knew that Ronan wanted him to have it, by the way he had pushed the tray over a few inches and the way he was reclined back in his seat again, broadcasting disinterest, but had his knee pressed deliberately into Adam’s and his fingers toying idly with the hair at the nape of Adam’s neck. 

It was making him shivery, lulling him into a state of ease and relaxation that meant Ronan could give him as much food as he wanted and Adam would hardly protest. 

But if three slices was enough for even Henry to notice, there was no way he could get away with four or five. He’d gotten spoiled over winter break. He was going to have to get used to eating normal portions again.

He settled for another breadstick until he and Ronan were safely locked away in the BMW, on the way to St. Agnes so Adam could finish up his homework. Adam opened the to-go box before they had even left the parking lot and Ronan turned, abruptly, to look at him, too surprised to try to be subtle about it. His right hand tightened on the gear shift, and he didn’t say anything at all as Adam lifted the slice of pizza to his mouth and devoured it in big, hungry bites. 

By the time they’d arrived at St. Agnes, Adam was full, finally, his stomach pulsing and tight. There was still one slice left, gloriously cheesy and perfect, but there hadn’t been time to finish it on the short drive, so with some reluctance, he closed the box. 

Ronan pulled into a parking space instead of idling out front to drop Adam off and going to Monmouth with everyone else. He killed the engine, and leaned over the console to kiss Adam before he could even unbuckle his seatbelt. 

There was something deeply longing about it, something different, but Adam couldn’t quite grasp what it was, not with Ronan sucking so fervently at his bottom lip. Adam pulled back, gasping, tonguing at his lips to chase the feeling. 

“You wanna take this inside?” Adam said. His accent had slipped into a drawl, heavy with want, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Not around Ronan. Not when it earned him the look Ronan was leveling him with. 

“Yeah.” 

Ronan’s voice was scratchy and his eyes were dark and intent. He was breathing hard, too hard from just this. Adam didn’t know quite what had made him come so undone so quickly, but he was determined to find out, because he wanted to do it again. 

“Well come on then, Lynch. I ain’t gonna wait all night.” Ronan was staring, and made no move to get out of the car. Adam grinned and closed the gap between them to kiss him, deep and filthy. He clicked open his seatbelt and, suddenly unrestrained, shoved himself into Ronan’s space. It it occurred to Adam that the craving that had gotten him caught up at Nino’s may have not been for pizza after all. 

Ronan broke away with a gasping breath. “Fuck, Parrish. Let’s get inside before Mrs. Ramirez sees us and I have to find another fucking church.” 

Adam snorted and let Ronan’s face slip from between his hands. 

They managed to get upstairs and close the door before Adam couldn’t stand not touching him anymore, wrapped his arms around Ronan’s broad shoulders and kissed the life out of him. 

Ronan’s hands on his hips were uncertain and fidgety. Adam puzzled over it until Ronan slid one hand to his front and dragged his palm down the expanse of Adam’s belly. It was as if the touch was meant to tease him on the way down to his waistband, but instead, Ronan lingered. His fingertips toyed with the little bit of softness gathered there, the bulge of his stomach where it was rounded out and probably more than a little bloated. It was just for a few moments, but it was enough. 

Adam lit up with realization. The way he’d eaten at Nino’s, though by no means extravagant, was the first time he’d let himself indulge like that in public—in front of their friends. It was a marker of how much of an effect Ronan had on him, was still having on him. 

He knew Ronan wouldn’t come out and say it, and he knew that if he brought it up himself, Ronan would shut down, so Adam bit back the impulse, the inexplicable desire to put his hand over Ronan’s and keep it where it was. He closed his eyes, rested his forehead on Ronan’s shoulder and let Ronan’s palm slide down instead. 

Ronan’s need bled through every touch. Adam could feel the way he shook, the way he held himself back, stroked Adam nice and slow, like he wasn’t dying for more. 

Adam wanted to push until that dam broke, until he could feel the full force of it. 

“ _ Shit, _ Ronan, come on.” Adam was startled by the sound of his own voice, the roughness of it, like he was the one who was desperate and aching. He needed—something. More. He wasn’t sure. 

Adam caught Ronan’s lips in a bruising kiss, pushed him down onto the mattress, and filed away the new addendums to his theory until he could figure out the best way to test them. 

***

Ronan’s BMW slid up to the curb as Adam walked across the Aglionby campus. It was cool but sunny and Adam had fully expected to walk home because his shitbox was out of commission. He bit back a smile and the window rolled down. Ronan said, “Hey asshole, you getting in or what?”

He was wearing sunglasses, but Adam could still see the way his eyes tracked up and down his body even through dark lenses. 

He knew what he looked like—how clingy his sweater was getting over his barely-there belly, and he was grateful, at least, for its dark color.

Except that when Ronan was looking at him like this, like he was trying to develop x-ray vision, it made Adam want to push out his belly a little, just to make those eyes light with interest. He didn’t. 

He dropped into the passenger's seat and Ronan threw a bag of fast food at him. Once upon a time, Adam would’ve been angry about this. A few months ago, he would’ve put up a token protest or made some halfhearted effort not to accept it, to lie to himself and say he wasn’t going to eat it before finally giving in only when he couldn’t take it anymore. 

Now, Adam bit back an admonishment. Maybe it had something to do with the way he knew it pleased Ronan just as much to give as it pleased Adam to eat it. Or maybe it was that he knew from the packaging alone that it was a dream thing. For anyone else, it might have been difficult to tell, but Adam was well-practiced. 

So he reached for a burger. There were several—way more than Adam could ever eat in one sitting. 

“Early dinner?” Adam asked. 

Ronan shrugged. “Snack.”

Adam narrowed his eyes. “Uh huh.” He opened the wrapper and took a big bite. It was  _ decadent. _ Mouth still half full, he mumbled, “Holy shit.”

Ronan grinned. “Good?”

He chewed his way through and swallowed. “This is incredible. How did you do this?”

Ronan tapped a finger against his temple, put the car in drive, and pulled up to the line of luxury vehicles piling out of the parking lot. “Secrets of the trade.” 

Adam wanted to inhale it, which was stupid because he wasn’t even hungry. It was spring break, which meant that teachers and students alike brought celebratory treats to class. So, in addition to his regular (admittedly meager) lunch, he’d managed to indulge in a bit more than his fair share.

He bit into the burger and considered that he never used to be the kind of person who would eat something if he didn’t need it, just because it tasted good, but that had clearly changed. 

He wasn’t hungry, but he wanted to eat, so he did. 

And Ronan could barely keep his eyes on the road. Adam didn’t know what was so distracting about just watching him eat, but the more time he spent running similar experiments, the more Adam was convinced that Ronan liked it. 

He was still trying to play it cool, to not let his feelings show, and Adam liked to push just enough to make Ronan’s facade crack, just a little. 

Ronan stepped on the brakes, stopped short behind the Maserati in front of them because he’d been too busy looking at Adam. His face was flushed pink and his jaw was clenching, unclenching. 

But Adam wanted more, so he pushed. 

“Hope you’re hungry, too,” he said. “I don’t think I could even make a dent in this.” He placed a hand over his belly, looking up to see Ronan’s expression when he said, “I’m already kinda full.” It was a bit of an exaggeration, maybe. His stomach capacity had grown so much over the past few months, it was taking more and more to get really  _ full. _

Ronan’s face was frozen in unconvincing neutrality. “How come?” 

Adam shrugged and swallowed another bite, said, “Guess everyone was in the mood to celebrate, today.” He licked his lips clean. “Mr. Welch ordered pizza for the class, one of those polo team assholes brought brownies, Tad Carruthers brought cupcakes. They were surprisingly good.”

Ronan cleared his throat, eyes focused on the road. Casually, he said, “You ate all that?”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t know you were going to bring me another ‘snack.’”

If he had known, Adam thought, wildly, that he might have done it anyway. He might have tried to sneak a bit more. Enough that he would have trouble sucking in. Enough that Ronan could tell, before he even got in the car, that he’d already had too much to eat. 

By the time they pulled into the St. Agnes parking lot, Adam had managed to wolf back two burgers and a handful of fries. He was feeling exceptionally bloated, head starting to swim in that pleasant, too-full haze. The waistband of his pants dug painfully into his hips and he squirmed, trying in vain to get more comfortable. 

Ronan looked at him as if he knew, but didn’t let his eyes linger like Adam was hoping. He shot out of the door and up the stairs to his apartment before Adam had even gotten all the way out of the car. Standing was more difficult than he thought it would be. He rubbed at his middle to try to get the ache to subside and walked gingerly up the stairs, clutching the bag of fast food.

When he got inside, he found himself a little breathless. He dropped the paper bag on his desk and hung his messenger bag on the back of his chair. Without thinking, he dug his thumb into the waistband of his chinos, pulling them back from his skin. 

He glanced at Ronan to gauge his reaction, but Adam couldn’t get past the rest of him long enough to see what he was sure would’ve only been a split-second fraction of an expression anyway, because Ronan was sprawled across his mattress, one leg canted up, letting the other spread wide, spilling onto the floor. One hand rested behind his head, making his shirt ride up, showing a sliver of skin and the waistband of his underwear. He had to know how distracting it was. How it looked like an invitation. Ronan said, “Take that shit off and we’ll head over to Monmouth. Gansey and Sargent are waiting.”

Like most Aglionby students, Adam typically wore his uniform about town, even after school. Today, he’d asked Ronan to swing by St. Agnes, hoping that he’d press for answers so that Adam would get the satisfaction of watching his face as he told him he wanted to change into something more comfortable, better fitting. But he hadn’t.

So instead, Adam would show him what he’d seen in the mirror that morning—the round, soft spill of fifteen or twenty pounds of extra weight, and how it made his uniform stretch around him. 

He ripped off his sweater. The button-down shirt underneath had been loose enough on his thinner frame that it was just now starting to show signs of not fitting correctly. If he managed to gain a few more pounds, he imagined it would be nearly unwearable. He loosened the tie and lifted it over his head.

The chinos had always been more fitted, so they were taking the brunt of the strain in the waist and thighs. 

That morning, studying his reflection, Adam remembered being ambivalent. He’d been annoyed with himself for giving into this thing with Ronan even though it already promised to be punishingly expensive, ridiculously impractical. He’d been annoyed with Ronan for encouraging this. He’d been annoyed at his wardrobe for betraying him when he was just trying to enjoy himself, for once. He’d been annoyed with himself, most of all. It was his fault he looked like this, now, that his uniform didn’t fit, that nothing really fit. 

But Adam knew what this was doing to Ronan, and that fact made something inside him light up, thrumming with desire. In that moment, this feeling overwhelmed everything else, and every ounce of his focus narrowed down to the satisfaction of Ronan’s eyes hooked on his belly. 

He sucked in as far as he could to pop open the button of his chinos and then released, let the zipper roll down from the pressure behind it. He lifted up the hem of his shirt so he could run his fingers over the stinging red indents circling his hips. 

“Shit,” he said. “These are getting tight.”

Ronan’s eyes darted up to Adam’s, guilty and caught, and he grunted in response. When it was clear that was all Adam was getting out of him, he finished undressing and slipped on a pair of jeans. They were looser than his chinos but were starting to feel snug, too. He made a show of sucking in to button them and then spent a moment deliberating in front of his closet with his shirt off. He chose a white t-shirt that was years old and worn soft, a little stretched out around the neck, but not stretched enough around the middle to hide his belly in the way that most of his shirts did. 

It was just loose enough that he didn’t think it was obvious why he chose it, but it still brought a bit of attention to his weight, and, for once, he let it. He switched his wallet and keys to his jeans, and while he was faced away from Ronan, he eyed the bag of fast food—debated with himself whether it was worth the inevitable stomachache. He was already full— _ overfull, _ and it would have been absurd to eat more, especially when he was sure he already had Ronan’s attention. These experiments were only exacerbating his weight gain, and he shouldn’t keep pushing it, but he felt reckless, exhilarated just from the thought of giving in. 

He was about to reach for the bag when Ronan said, “Parrish.” 

Adam turned around to find Ronan in much the same position as before, now with the fingers of his free hand teasing the skin of his own exposed stomach, his eyes dark. Adam bit back a smirk, leaned back against his desk. “Lynch. You need somethin’?” 

“ _ Fucking come here. _ ” Ronan said, pleading. 

Adam walked over to the bed, leaned over him. He grasped Ronan’s jaw in one hand and bent forward to kiss him, one knee braced on the mattress to keep his balance, right in between Ronan’s thighs. Ronan pushed up into the kiss, chased his lips when he pulled back, made a plaintive sound in the back of his throat. His eyes fluttered open. 

Adam smiled. Despite how tempting it was to give Ronan exactly what he wanted, what they both wanted, Adam was going to make him wait for it. He wondered, idly, just how much he could push him—if Gansey would want to get Nino’s or gelato or both. If he could even handle that much food or if he’d have to tap out, stuffed too full to eat any more. He thought Ronan would appreciate it either way. 

He held out a hand and said, “Come on, Lynch, we’ve got somewhere to be.” 

Ronan’s face fell into a petulant frown, but he took Adam’s hand and let himself be pulled up. Adam slipped on a jacket and let a grin overtake his face while it was hidden.

Ronan picked Adam’s chinos up off the floor and said, like he’d been thinking about it, “You know, you can have mine, if you give that much of a shit.”

“Ronan,” he warned. 

“I have five pairs, okay? Not like I’m gonna fucking wear them.”

Ronan was right. He wouldn’t have any use for neat khaki chinos at the Barns, and it didn’t make sense for Adam to buy new ones with only three months left at Aglionby. Unlike Adam, Ronan’s waist was trim and taut, but he wore a size up from him, anyway. He was broader all over, but not so much taller that he’d probably have to get them tailored, either. 

“Fine,” he sighed, a concession to the frustrating practicality of it. “But only until I lose weight, okay? I’m just borrowing them,” Adam said, just to roll the words on his tongue, find out how they tasted. They tasted more than a little bit like a lie. 

Ronan smirked like he knew. “Whatever you say, Parrish.”

***

Ronan had dreamt Adam a brand new suit to wear for graduation. When he’d presented it to him, Adam had braced himself for his own fury, only to find it lacking. He had been snappish whenever the subject was broached for days, but it felt somehow vague, routine. 

As his graduation date crept closer, he resigned himself to the inevitability of wearing the dream suit. 

This was how he justified it to himself: Ronan hadn’t expected him to be happy about it, or grateful, and he let him sulk until he made up his mind. The suit itself was nice, but not ostentatious, not like the suits Ronan bought himself or worse, the ones  _ Gansey _ bought. It was plain grey with a crisp, white shirt and a navy blue tie. It wouldn’t have stood out to Adam as anything but an average, off-the-rack department store suit that he could have bought himself, on sale, for a week’s wages, if it weren’t for the way that it fit him like a glove. 

Because his old suit didn’t stand a chance in hell of fitting, and they both knew it. 

He hadn’t lost any weight. 

So one afternoon, he took the new suit off its hangers and tried it on. It curved gently around his body, too comfortable not to be made of dreamstuff. 

Adam looked at himself in a standing, antique mirror in Ronan’s parents’ old bedroom while Ronan watched him, leaning in the open doorway with his arms crossed over his chest. The color distortion of tarnished silver made Adam’s reflection look like an old photograph of a distant relative that he’d never met—familiar features on an unfamiliar person.

He spent some time cataloguing changes, the most recent of which was his face. It was filled-out and soft, a far cry from his old hollowed-out, sunken cheeks. He still had exhausted shadows under his eyes, but otherwise, he looked almost healthy. 

He looked  _ well fed, _ he thought, dazed. 

And he was. Ronan hadn’t stopped encouraging him, and Adam hadn’t asked him to. He didn’t know how far this was going to go, how far he’d  _ let _ it go, but he hadn’t found himself wanting to stop, either—not yet. Not really. 

So he gained weight. 

He had been apprehensive about checking exactly how much, these past few months. Today, he found himself in the locker room at school, after gym. He eyed the scale they used mostly for wrestling weight classes and waited for everyone to filter out. 

With just a damp towel around his waist, he stepped on the scale. 

It read 192 pounds. 

192 pounds was nothing he would have considered extremely overweight, but it was a much higher number than he was accustomed to seeing and edging startlingly close to 200. He felt dizzy thinking about it. 

On his frame, the weight sat in obvious places. His rounded belly and love handles took the brunt of it, a thick spare tire bulging from his hips. His legs had become muscular from adding his own weight to the labor he did at work, but his thighs were undeniably fat—fat enough to rub together when he walked, wearing away the fabric at the inseam of his pants. The suit masked his chest, but Adam knew what was underneath—how it had swelled into fat handfuls that hadn’t yet gotten big enough to roll over and fold underneath, but when he sat down, he could see where it would eventually make a permanent crease that wrapped all the way around his back, overflowing flesh streaked with tiny pink lines to match the ones on his belly. 

Everything had softened out—his arms, his ass, even his fingers. And his face. Adam tipped his head up and clenched his jaw, trying to make the slight double chin lessen, but it wouldn’t go away completely. 

And there it was. He could suck in his gut all he wanted, but there was no way for him to hide the rest of it. Not anymore. 

He looked chubby. Just a little, but enough that he felt himself stand out. His skinny body had made it so much easier to hide, to slip past people’s judgement, but now he took up more space, and he didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t know what people thought when they saw him. He found it difficult to reconcile the reflection in the mirror with his own mental image of himself. He didn’t know when he’d get used to it—if he’d get used to it. 

Ronan watched all of this in silence. Adam turned to him, spread his arms out, and said, “Well?” 

Ronan let his eyes wander, long enough that Adam started to feel fidgety before he flicked his eyes back up with a smirk. “You’d look better out of it.” 

Adam sighed and turned back to his reflection. Ronan came up on his side and fisted one hand in the suit jacket, kissed the underside of his jaw once, twice, and said, “What’s your problem, college boy?”

Adam closed his eyes. “Nothing.”

“I regret to inform you that that wasn’t the least bit convincing, Parrish. Try again.”

“It’s just that I’ve… gained a lot of weight.”

Adam heard the hitch in Ronan’s breath because his lips were tracing his hearing ear. He pulled back far enough to look Adam in the eye. His expression was unreadable. He nodded. 

“I…” Adam stopped, took a breath, started again. “I should probably cut back a little.” His stomach plummeted and as he said it, he realized that even with all of this, even with every single one of the downsides stacked together, it was somehow the last thing he wanted to do. “I should.” He licked his lips and held Ronan’s gaze. “Right?”

Ronan’s face gave nothing away. He shrugged and said, “Do what you want.”

_ I don’t know what I want, _ Adam thought. But that wasn’t exactly true. What he wanted was stupid and selfish and myopic. He’d given in to it too many times, but it was just that… he was happy, he realized, and the thought of having to stop, of being unable to give this to Ronan whenever he wanted, was intolerable. 

Adam used to be so good at denying himself. 

“I don’t want to cut back,” he said. 

Ronan’s face relaxed, fractionally. “So don’t.”

“Okay,” Adam said, like it was that easy. 

The tenderness in Ronan’s gaze grew obvious, uncensored. Adam kept thinking he’d have to get used to that look sometime, but even months later, it made him feel too warm, sweaty all over like ice in the sun. 

Adam kissed him so he’d stop, so he’d never stop. Ronan’s attention drew to his hips and he slipped his hands under the suit jacket to fit around Adam’s love handles, squeezing tight, pulling him close. 

_ This _ was what he wanted.  _ This, this, this. _

Ronan pulled back from his lips and slid to his knees, eye level with Adam’s belly. Adam let himself imagine, just for a moment, that Ronan was about to kiss him there. Instead, he let his face fall forward to rest, pillowed against it. It wasn’t the first time, but it made Adam reel anyway, and he was suddenly, stupidly grateful for the dresser behind him, holding him up. 

Adam brought his hand up to cradle Ronan’s head and tried, in vain, to keep his breath even, to slow down his heart.

Ronan said “You’re fucking perfect, you know that, right?” Adam was shaking his head, but Ronan couldn’t see it. “Perfect,” he said. “So fucking perfect, Adam.” 

He opened his eyes and stared up at him, startling blue set with dark lashes, and Adam could have begged Ronan to touch him. He opened his mouth, but Ronan’s eyes snapped away from him, over to the open door. 

Adam followed his gaze to Opal, crouched in the hallway. 

Ronan stood up and said, “Kid, what the fuck did I tell you?” He strode out the doorway and scooped Opal into his arms. 

“Kerah!” she screeched with joy. 

Affectionately, he said, “Creepy little asshole,” and lifted her onto his shoulders. He spun around to look at Adam. “I’m gonna make lunch, what do you feel like?”

“Um,” Adam still felt breathless. He didn’t know how Ronan could switch out of intimate moments so easily. “Surprise me. I’ll... be down in a few.”

When he heard Ronan stomp down the stairs, Adam collapsed back against the dresser and closed his eyes. 

***

“Are you done schmoozing yet?” Ronan loosened his tie with a violent jerk. He was dressed in all black, sleek and expensive, but he looked thoroughly out of place amongst DC’s elite. He was too venomous, too striking, too untouchable. It was surreal to see him here, seething but somehow reined in enough to attend a party hosted by Senator Gansey and populated almost exclusively by Republicans. 

“I don’t even know why you’re doing this to yourself,” Ronan growled. “It’s not like you want to be a fucking politician, for Christ’s sake.” 

He was right, in a way. Adam knew it would be a good idea to mingle, but he had already spoken to all of the most influential Harvard alumnus and the head of an engineering firm. They had lost Gansey and Blue an hour ago in the crowd and without Gansey’s direction, Adam wasn’t sure who else would be valuable to speak to. 

But Adam was enjoying the food, and he was enjoying looking at Ronan. He wasn’t ready to leave quite yet. He swallowed a mouthful of quiche and said, “We’re here for Gansey, remember? Just a little while longer.”

Ronan’s nostrils flared and his mouth formed a sneer. To distract him, Adam gestured to the remaining puff pastry on his little white plate and said, “Go get me some more of these.” 

He emptied his glass of champagne and watched Ronan’s scowl smooth out. 

Ronan dropped his empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter and snatched him a full one before stalking off to find the puff pastries. Adam took a careful sip, a little relieved to find that it was ginger ale. His head was already swimming, a little drunk and a little dazed from the fullness in his belly. 

He could feel the way it tensed the fabric of his shirt and put pressure on the belt around his waist. He could tell that it was only a matter of time before he’d outgrow this dream-suit like he had outgrown his old one. The thought had his heart racing. He wanted—something. 

Adam finished his food and drink and circled the room, trying to catch a glimpse of Ronan in the sea of politicians. 

He finally found him by one of the buffet tables, loading up two plates. Adam sidled up behind him, close enough that his belly pressed into Ronan’s back. Ronan looked over his shoulder and Adam watched his chest inflate with a quick, inhaled breath. 

“Asshole,” Ronan said, spinning around and shoving a plate at his chest. 

Adam took the plate and shoved a puff pastry into his mouth in one bite. Ronan’s eyebrows flew up. 

Someone jostled into Adam—a large, jovial-looking, familiar-faced man. He said, “My apologies. Oh, hello, you’re Richard’s friend. Parker, wasn’t it?”

Adam swallowed his food and held his hand out. The man grasped it in a firm handshake. He and Gansey had spoken to him for a few minutes last year, but Adam couldn’t quite recall his name, either. “Parrish,” he corrected. “Adam. Nice to see you, sir.” He gestured next to him and said, “This is my—Ronan. Ronan Lynch.”

“Ah, yes, I remember Mr. Lynch.” The look in the man’s eyes turned wary, and Adam itched to know what Ronan had done to earn it. Something terrible, he was sure. Before he could ask, the man looked back at Adam and continued, “You’ve grown a bit since I last saw you. College living taking its toll, eh?”

It took Adam a moment to realize what he must have been talking about, and when he did, he was taken aback. He knew the weight he’d gained had to have been noticeable, but no one, not even Ronan, had ever brought it up before Adam did, himself. 

Something like a rush coursed through him, and he thought it might have been anger or embarrassment, and he forced out, “Not yet. I start in the fall.”

The man reached a hand out to pat Adam’s stomach. “Oh, well, you might want to watch out for that freshman fifteen!” He winked. “Looks like it might have snuck up on you, already.”

Ronan grabbed the man’s wrist and locked eyes with him, leveling him with a tight  _ fuck off  _ glare. 

Adam sighed and pushed Ronan back a step. “I’ll be sure to do that,” he said. 

The man cleared his throat and sent Adam a nervous glance. “Well, if you boys will excuse me, I should get back to my wife.” He left the buffet table without food. 

“Ronan—”

“He shouldn’t talk to you like that.”

“Okay, well, I’m sure that’s not the last time I’m gonna get commentary about this, so you’re gonna have to get used to it.”

“I’m gonna have to get  _ used _ to people being shitty to you?”

“It wasn’t that bad. And I can defend myself.”

“Whatever.”

Maybe he should have been more bothered by it, but now that he was examining his emotional state, he realized he wasn’t angry or more than a little embarrassed. It was something else. 

Regardless, the man had been pretty big, certainly bigger than Adam, and Adam hadn’t thought he’d meant anything by it. Something about his demeanor had been inoffensive, but it was possible that Adam was too distracted to form a real opinion on the matter. 

He grabbed another glass and sipped champagne in between bites of food. 

Others had to have noticed how much bigger Adam had gotten—an extra forty pounds was not exactly subtle. Blue and Gansey were too polite to say anything, and Ronan was too secretive. He had caught a handful of boys at school and a couple of coworkers and  _ Orla Sargent _ sending him furtive, judgemental glances. Those looks had twisted his stomach, but it was humiliating in a different way than having people eye the frayed edges of his second-hand Aglionby uniform in a way he couldn’t even explain to himself. 

But hearing someone actually bring up his weight  _ out loud _ made something shift. It was that rush, the one he’d mistaken for anger, at first. Adam tried to sort through the feeling, but he couldn’t. He was having a difficult time convincing himself that it mattered. 

What mattered was Ronan, looking like a rubber band ready to snap. The champagne hadn’t mellowed him like it had done to Adam. He was a line of tension, his fingers brushing periodically against Adam’s elbow, his back, his shoulder.

Adam picked out the cracks in Ronan’s mask with practiced ease and  _ pushed _ . 

He shoveled back the contents of his plate, his glass of champagne, and the second plate that Ronan had barely touched. He crammed a tiny quiche into his mouth and watched Ronan watch him. He hiccupped with his mouth closed and felt his belly shake with the force of it. Adam felt tight in his skin—or maybe that was just his suit. 

Ronan stepped imperceptibly closer to him, took his empty glass and plate and set them down on a table.

“God,” Adam said, looking down at himself. His belly pushed out far enough to make the button on his blazer strain. He popped it open and smoothed a hand over himself, feeling reckless and bold and full of wanting. “You should’ve dreamed me up a bigger suit.”

Ronan stayed impassive, not yet taking the bait. He reached out to finger the lapel of Adam’s blazer all the way down to the bottom hem. “Fuck you, it looks awesome. I’m better than a tailor.”

“You don’t—” He hiccupped. It was loud enough that he should have been embarrassed—enough that he knew he should care, but all he cared about was the gnawing pit of need inside him and how much he wanted to fill it—with food, with drink, with Ronan’s attention. “You don’t think I could use a little more room?”

Ronan paused, breathed in through his nose and out through his teeth. “Why would you want that?” 

Adam hiccupped again, but managed to hold it behind his fist and then say, “Shit. Maybe so it’s not so obvious to everyone at this party that I gained several pounds since I got it?”

Ronan’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second before his expression smoothed back out. He glanced around at the party around them and bared his teeth. “Who gives a flying fuck what these people think?”

A woman nearby looked startled and he turned his glare on her until she passed them. 

Adam rolled his eyes and waved his hand at Ronan’s everything. “That’s easy for you to say, you look—”  _ Dashing and dangerous, like James Bond.  _

“You know how you look, Adam?” Ronan stepped closer, likely so that Adam could hear him better, close enough that they were touching, brushing together with every movement. Adam’s stomach swooped and Ronan hissed, “Handsome and professional and intimidating and  _ fucking hot. _ ”

Adam’s heart thrashed in his chest. He’d lost control of the conversation, and in a bid to get it back, more matter-of-fact than he ever had, he said, “I look fat.”

He watched as the blow hit Ronan, how his eyes trailed helplessly down Adam’s body and how he fought with himself to maintain the appearance of indifference, but Adam saw the blotchy flush on his cheeks and the hunger in his eyes. He thought he had him, finally, finally. 

Ronan said, “There are at least fifty people here who are fatter than you, and they’re all powerful, rich sleazebags.” He reached out to pinch the silky fabric of Adam’s tie between his fingertips, letting his knuckles brush his stomach. “Just like you’re gonna be one day.”

Adam snorted. “I'm gonna be a sleazebag?” 

“Oh, no question.” 

Adam steeled himself to try again. He wanted Ronan to stop trying to make him feel better. He was seconds away from hauling him off to find somewhere he could kiss him, but he wanted Ronan to break first. He was close. He could feel it. 

Slyly, Adam said, “And fat?”

It hit harder this time. More. Like he hadn’t fully recovered from the first time Adam had said it. Adam pressed his shoulder into Ronan’s and leaned in close so he could whisper in his ear, watched his eyes slip shut and felt his breath stutter out of his mouth. Adam said, “Sorry, fatt _ er. _ ” 

“Fuck, I—”

“The way things are going, you might be right, Lynch.” 

Adam pulled back to look at his face. His eyes were shut tight, mouth open as if he wanted to say something. 

“Ronan,” Adam said, tired of waiting. “You wanna get out of here?”

Ronan grabbed Adam’s wrist and pulled him through the crowd, to the edge of the room, out into a hallway, and another. He was walking faster than Adam could really keep up with in this state, but he was desperate enough that he followed Ronan’s pace without complaint. It was quieter towards the front of the house, though he could still hear the hum of string music and the chatter of the party. 

Ronan opened a door. It was a closet—a large walk-in filled with expensive coats. He dragged Adam inside, shut the door, and kissed him. 

***

Adam woke up with the furnace-heat of a familiar body wrapped around him. He was in Ronan’s bed and he knew that because his own brick of a mattress was leagues behind this dream-soft thing. It smelled like Ronan and the Barns. 

His thoughts were sludgy and thick with sleep and it took him a disoriented moment to realize what had woken him up. 

Ronan was curled around him, petting his belly in a way that could have been soothing. Should have been. But Adam was trembling, and hard, his blood coursing hot and electric through his veins. 

He had no idea how awake Ronan was—his movements were lazy and slow, probably not meant to make Adam react like it was. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. 

Sometimes, tentatively, Ronan would touch his belly during sex. In context Adam could understand why he reacted the way he did—he’d get caught up in Ronan’s desire and mirror it.

Now, stripped of context, it was just Ronan’s fingers stroking over Adam’s bare skin. It should have been simple comfort and affection, but instead it left a trail of shivery pleasure in its wake—enough to wake him from a deep sleep.

Adam endured this until Ronan’s fingertips traced the soft underside of Adam’s belly and jerked up in a feather-light, contained movement that made his belly fat shake and ripple. 

A moan slipped from Adam’s lips, quiet but damning. Ronan froze. Neither of them moved for ten agonizing seconds. To break the silence, Adam said, “Mornin’.” 

“Good morning.” 

Ronan opened his mouth to suck wet kisses into the space between his neck and jaw. Another sound tripped out of Adam’s mouth and he rested his hand over Ronan’s. Ronan grabbed his belly tight in his hand and pulled their bodies closer together, rolling his hips. “Ah, shit,” Adam whispered. 

“Fucking  _ finally, _ I’ve been waiting for you to wake up for like, an  _ hour. _ You must’ve been having some wet dream, Parrish.” He could hear the smile in Ronan’s voice. “Was it about me?” 

Adam hadn’t remembered what he’d been dreaming about until that moment, but suddenly, vividly, he did. Adam had been at the head of a table in front of a truly decadent meal, the kind of meal that Adam had only seen in movies—a banquet of steak and lobster and platters of fruit and layered chocolate cakes taller than Ronan. Ronan  _ had _ been in this dream, come to think of it. In a black tuxedo, serving Adam so he wouldn’t have to get up. 

This was embarrassing for more reasons than he cared to think about before his brain was fully functioning, so he kept his mouth shut. Ronan seemed too busy palming at Adam’s belly and sucking marks into his skin to notice. 

Adam was on fire with it, writhing back against him, and found himself with his fingers locked around Ronan’s wrist, pressing his hand into his gut. He tilted his head back, arching into Ronan’s mouth. 

“Jesus, shit,” Ronan panted into his shoulder. 

Adam flipped around to frame his face with both hands and kiss him, deep and clumsy. When he pulled back, he watched Ronan’s eyes flutter open. Just behind his head, Adam saw a bedside tray covered with a metal lid. He said, “Wha’s that?” 

“Nothing,” Ronan said, diving in for another kiss. 

Adam leaned his head back, evading Ronan’s mouth and then rolled on top of him so he could reach for the handle on top of the lid and pull it off. 

“Oh,” he said. It was breakfast—heaping plates of waffles and eggs and sausage and toast and home fries. He took a whiff and licked his lips. It smelled amazing. On second look, the tray wasn’t sitting on legs—It was floating, suspended in midair. 

Adam had never been so certain of anything as he was that Ronan had dreamt this for him, even if he wouldn’t say it. 

Adam opened his mouth and considered telling him everything—that he knew what Ronan wanted, and he could have it. He couldn’t say what stopped him, but he bit his tongue and asked, even though he didn’t need to, “You dreamt this?” 

“Guess so. You want breakfast in bed?” Ronan was rubbing up and down Adam’s thighs and Adam was having a hard time deciding what he really wanted. He wanted Ronan to keep touching him. He wanted to eat. He wanted Ronan’s hands on his belly again. He wanted the fullness in his stomach to overwhelm him, to overwhelm them both. 

He heard himself say, “God, yeah.”

Ronan grinned, sharp and sexy, and flipped him onto his back in one swift movement. Adam pushed himself up so he was halfway closer to sitting, reclined on the mass of fluffy pillows behind him. 

Ronan reached for the tray and tugged it over until it hovered between them, its scent filling the room. Adam grabbed a triangular piece of toast and bit into it. Melted butter dripped down his fingers and reached his wrist before he managed to shove the rest of it into his mouth. 

Ronan sat beside him, eyes boring into the side of Adam’s face, and he made no move to eat anything, himself. Adam said, “Not having anything?”

Ronan grabbed his hand, brought it to his mouth and licked the butter off Adam’s skin. Adam gasped, watched Ronan’s tongue and his lips wrapped around his index finger, enveloping him in wet heat. 

“Oh, god,” Adam said.

“Keep eating.” Ronan kept his eyes fixed on Adam’s and licked a line up from his wrist to the tip of his finger.

“Shit.” Adam felt dazed. “Okay. Okay.”

He reached for the waffles, cleaved a slice from the stack with the edge of his fork and brought it to his mouth. It was delicious—crispy edges and soft inside, smothered with syrup and whipped cream and sliced strawberries. He could feel Ronan’s kisses on the palm of his hand. A noise slipped out, involuntary.

“How is it?” Ronan asked. 

Adam finished chewing. He realized his eyes were closed and he opened them, turned his head to look at Ronan’s pink-red skin and the open want etched into his face. Adam said, “Amazing.” He let out a breath, cupped Ronan’s cheek in the hand that Ronan still cradled close to his face. Ronan’s eyes fluttered shut. 

Adam’s heart thudded behind his ribcage. He kissed him, lingering, soft, a voice for the whispers in his heart and belying the need churning in his belly. Ronan drew Adam’s bottom lip into his mouth and sucked the taste of syrup off, kissed him over and over until Adam’s stomach let out a pathetic growl. 

Ronan broke away with a breathy laugh and when Adam had recovered enough to open his eyes, found him grinning, wide and shark-like. He kissed Adam again, trailed his lips down Adam’s neck, shifted his weight so his arm was wrapped loosely around Adam’s middle. Between kisses, he said, “Keep eating.” 

Adam gasped. “How am I supposed to eat if you keep distracting me, huh?”

“I’m sure you can manage. Show me those multitasking skills, Ivy League.”

Adam laughed and picked up a spoon so he could shovel in a mouthful of perfect, cheesy scrambled eggs sprinkled with bacon and chives. Ronan’s tongue was at his pulse point and his hand was resting innocently on Adam’s waist. Adam rolled his hips in hopes that Ronan would take it as permission to touch him more. 

Ronan grinned into his neck and kept his hand still. Adam was aching, but Ronan wanted him to keep eating, so he ate. 

He chugged the orange juice in quick gulps, pausing only long enough to marvel at the way it refilled itself before his eyes. The home fries went down easy for all that they were deep fried and greasy, and when he was near the end, he could feel Ronan’s fingers spider-walk across his hip. It wasn’t enough. He was squirming, needy, and he knew Ronan would touch him when he’d finished breakfast, but he wasn’t sure he could wait that long without losing his mind. It was already cracking, fixed single-mindedly on the desperate, insistent thought of  _ more, more, more.  _

Adam picked up another piece of toast and spooned the last of the eggs onto it, devoured it in bites that bordered on greedy. He was getting full, already. Idly, he wondered how many eggs he’d just eaten, how many potatoes. They had both looked so mountainous when he started, but they’d dwindled into nothing so much faster than they should have. He looked down at himself and it was clear where they’d gone. 

Ronan’s fingertips slid across the exposed skin of his lower belly. Adam shivered, clenched his jaw in an effort to cling to a semblance of composure. He speared a fat breakfast sausage on his fork, to convince Ronan, without words, that he deserved more, and when he brought it to his lips a burp slipped out, low and rumbling. “Excuse me,” he said. 

The embarrassed heat under his skin ratcheted up so high he thought maybe Ronan could feel it on his tongue, from where it traced the shell of Adam’s ear. Instead, Adam felt Ronan’s breath stutter, cool on his wet skin, and heard a high, shaky noise, so quiet that if Ronan weren’t pressed so closely to Adam’s hearing ear it’s possible he wouldn’t have heard it at all. He buried his face in Adam’s throat and breathed rapid, gasping breaths.

It was good to know that Ronan was just as overcome as he was and he smiled, victorious, as he finished his sausage and cut himself a huge chunk of waffles as a well-earned reward. 

Ronan cupped his belly and held it still. Even in Ronan’s large hands it was well more than a handful. After a moment, Ronan eased his thumb up, so carefully, to trace Adam’s navel in an easy circle. He shivered and his fork clattered to an empty plate. His head fell back and he was just barely managing to hold in the desperate noises lodged in his chest.  _ Yes, _ he thought,  _ yes. _

Ronan squeezed, Adam’s belly yielding in his hand. He cried, “ _ Ah! _ ”

“Adam,” Ronan said. 

It took Adam a moment to realize that Ronan was trying to tell him something. He said, “Hm?” 

Ronan lifted his head up to look Adam in the eye. He raised his brows and glanced back at the tray, and Adam recognized the order.  _ Keep eating. _

Adam had already eaten more than enough for anyone with a normal appetite. And although Ronan knew that Adam no longer had one of those, Adam was surprised by how obvious he was being, how completely clear it was what Ronan wanted from him. How there was no mistaking this for anything but what it was. 

He glanced at the tray, still crowned with a slightly dented pile of waffles and some sausages. “Seriously, Ronan?” Adam’s voice was slurred with drowsiness and lust, and not nearly as firm as he’d intended. “I’m not going to be able to finish all of this.” 

Ronan shrugged. “‘Kay.” He threw a leg over Adam’s thigh and ran his hand up the expanse of his belly to tap his fingers just over his stomach, where it was swollen and grumbling. “But you’re not full yet, are you?”

“No,” Adam said, even though he was, because when Ronan had said  _ full, _ what he really meant was  _ stuffed, _ and he wasn’t—not yet.

Adam reached for his fork. He pulled the tray closer so he could shove bites in his mouth with less attention paid to dripping syrup on Ronan’s bedspread. Ronan circled his hand around Adam’s belly, and it shouldn’t have been nearly as sexy as it was. It was something he’d done dozens of times when Adam had eaten too much, just to help ease the ache. He liked it. He’d always liked it. But like this, each gentle sweep felt forbidden, sent waves of heat through his body. A burp rumbled up from his belly, slow enough that he could feel it coming, but powerful enough that he couldn’t quite muffle the sound behind his free hand. The pressure release was an incredible relief. 

He must have stopped eating, must have started to let himself sink into the feeling of Ronan’s hands and mouth. Ronan made a sound in his throat, gripped a handful of Adam’s belly fat, but his voice was incongruously easy, almost casual. “Fucking Christ, Adam, if you can’t concentrate enough to eat this meal I  _ slaved  _ over all night, I’m just going to have to feed it to you.”

“Fuu-uck,” Adam moaned. The words echoed in his head, unleashing something desperate and wild even before he even had the chance to process what they meant, before he could picture exactly what it might be like, to be fed. 

Sensation flooded through him—his belly in Ronan’s hand, his body heat pressed against him shoulder to thigh, the rush of blood pumping through his veins, the familiar, heady pressure of too much food in his belly, the taste of syrup in his mouth, the way Ronan’s leg rested so close to Adam’s cock. 

_ I’m just going to have to feed it to you. _

Adam said, “Okay.”

“What?”

“Do it.” He didn’t know if he needed some type of excuse, if they were still playing this game. He said, “It’s early. I’m tired.” Adam took a breath. “Feed it to me.”

Ronan shoved the tray to Adam’s other side and straddled him in a movement that was almost graceful if not for the way he hit his knee on the edge of the tray and swore viciously. The tray bobbed in midair, precariously, but righted itself before any food spilled. Ronan sat in Adam’s lap and Adam grabbed onto his hips, tilted his own so he was surrounded by the heat of Ronan’s ass. 

Ronan fell forward, caught himself with his hands braced on the mattress, and all at once his face crumpled. Something complicated—pained and ecstatic—overtook his expression. He whispered a string of words and something that sounded like, “Jesus Mary mother of fuck.”

For a few seconds Ronan was completely still, didn’t so much as look at him. He had his eyes shut tight, head down, dragging in ragged breaths, trembling. Adam ran a hand over Ronan’s skull, the short bristles of his hair. Abruptly, he realized that Ronan’s dick was pressed tight into his belly. 

His breath hitched and he said, “Ronan.”

Ronan blinked open his eyes and stared up at Adam though his lashes, fire and heat. He licked his lips. Adam raised his eyebrows and shot a look over to the tray and back, trying to hold back a smile but probably failing. 

“Asshole,” Ronan said, all breath. “Fuck. You don’t know what you—” 

“I know. I know. Come on, Ronan.” 

Ronan sat up, took a breath, and tilted his head back like he was trying to compose himself. He reached for a fork and knife, cut the remaining waffles into bite-sized chunks and speared several, holding his hand underneath to catch drips of syrup as he brought it to Adam’s mouth. 

It wasn’t as though this was the first time, technically, that Ronan had fed him. When he cooked, he’d often feed Adam little bites to check the taste. He would reach a pink plastic spoon across the table to get him to try the flavor of gelato he’d bought. Just last week, when they’d been tangled on the couch, sharing containers of Chinese takeout, he’d held a dumpling to Adam’s lips for him to eat clumsily from his chopsticks. 

This shouldn’t have felt so new, but there was something striking about this focused intent—the deliberateness of it—the way neither of them could claim it as casual or blame it on anything else except Ronan wanting to feed him and Adam wanting him to.

He took the whole bite into his mouth until it puffed out his cheeks as he chewed and watched the awestruck vulnerability clouding Ronan’s face, wondering if his own looked the same. He held Ronan too tightly and tried his absolute hardest to keep it together. 

Ronan fed him another bite, and another, and then he started to rock his hips—just barely. Adam’s eyes rolled back in his head. A moan slipped out even though he had his mouth full and his lips were shut. Ronan rocked down again, again. 

“Adam,” he said, voice wrecked. Adam felt something at his lips, swallowed and opened them so Ronan could slide his fork in. “Yeah, that’s it.”

Adam chewed, swallowed, opened his mouth. Ronan was keeping an unsteady rhythm with his hips now, slow and easy, and it wouldn’t have been nearly enough to get Adam off, except that he’d been teetering perilously on edge for what felt like  _ hours _ . His stomach was starting to pulse with the kind of achy pressure that would usually make him stop eating, or at least pause. 

_ Just a little more, _ Adam thought. He felt greedy for it. He opened his mouth for the sausage poised on the end of Ronan’s fork and bit it in half before taking the whole thing in his mouth. 

Ronan’s mouth was parted, sucking in breaths. “Are you…” He traced his thumb on the edge of Adam’s mouth and wiped something off. “Are you getting full?”

Adam laughed and the sound of it trailed into a hiccup. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “Think it’s pretty safe to say, Lynch.” Ronan smiled, devilish. “God, How many fucking—” he hiccupped, again— “waffles was that, anyway?” 

“Lots,” Ronan said. He rubbed his free hand across the tight crest of Adam’s stomach. “You ready to tap out?”

“No.” Adam thought  _ keep doing that, keep doing that. _ He realized that he was moving, hips lifting off the bed to push up against Ronan. 

“Okay.” Ronan looked as shattered as Adam felt, like he was barely holding himself together, either. He reached over to pick up another forkful of waffles and said, “Only a little more left.”

“What?” Adam looked over to the tray, startled to find it nearly empty, just a mess of syrupy waffle pieces—not even enough to cover the plate. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” Ronan’s palm rested on the side of Adam’s stomach, where it was round and bloated and tight. He pressed in quickly, experimentally, and Adam’s belly shook, still blubbery on the lower half, even as full as he was. Adam gasped in a breath and Ronan said, with admiration, “You sure can eat, Parrish.” 

“And whose fault is that?” 

Ronan sputtered. “Whatever. It’s not like I’m fucking forcing you.” 

Adam narrowed his eyes into a glare, but he felt its lack of heat even before Ronan grinned, triumphant, unrepentant. “Just—give me the rest,” Adam panted. 

Ronan paused, licked his lips. “Is it enough? I can always get some more.” He reached out to caress Adam’s face with his fingertips. “You can have as much as you want, Adam.”

Adam suddenly couldn’t take it—how much he wanted. He felt lit up with it. He knew he wouldn’t be able to take much more—this was already more than enough to incapacitate him, but he wanted it all the same. He wanted to keep going, just like this, forever. But he said, “Maybe later.”

“Just say the word.”

Holding his grin behind his lips, Ronan speared half a dozen pieces onto the fork, enough that it barely fit in Adam’s mouth. He felt syrup drip down his chin and Ronan’s eyes were locked on it.

It hurt now—even just the light jerking motion of Ronan’s hips shook his belly in a way that was vaguely unpleasant, but he didn’t have the willpower to still him when each brush of Ronan’s ass on his cock was a shockwave of pleasure that pushed him closer and closer to the edge. 

Adam took Ronan’s free hand and pressed it into his belly against the tightest buildup of pressure on the left side of his stomach. A tremulous moan tripped out of Ronan’s mouth and a burp tripped out of Adam’s. 

He was sure this was unattractive, but if it was, Ronan didn’t seem to notice. His hand clutched at Adam’s belly and his eyes fluttered shut. “Fuck,” he moaned. “Fuck.” He dropped the last forkful of waffles onto the tray without looking where it landed, leaned forward and lapped syrup from Adam’s jawline and chin and licked into his mouth, messy and wet. 

Adam broke away and cried, “ _ Ronan! _ ” It was too much—he was burning, grinding up into Ronan’s ass, too gone to care how he must look, how loud he was being. “God, please, please.”

Adam felt something sticky and warm against his lips and disoriented, blinked open his eyes to find Ronan holding the last bite of waffles in front of him. Adam was leaning forward and wrapping his lips around it before the thought even filtered through, and Ronan shuddered, his cock pulsing against the softness of his lower belly, coming with Adam’s name on his lips

Adam fought to sit up enough to curl into Ronan’s body, but found that he couldn’t. His stomach seized and he was pinned to the bed, too full to move and he was too close, too impatient to wait for Ronan to recover enough to take care of him. 

He ground up and up and up and Ronan’s eyes cracked open, bleary and dazed. He spread both palms over Adam’s belly and Adam was done for. He said, “Ronan, Ronan, Ronan.”

Waves of bliss crashed over him and tears slipped from his eyes as he came, and he was so, so full. 

The room echoed its silence and stillness. His world was the velvet black behind his eyelids and Ronan’s weight on top of him. 

Until Ronan clambered off of him and started to roll away, as if he was leaving the bed. Adam wrapped an arm around his waist and groaned a protest. He was self-aware enough to admit to himself that he sounded pathetic, but he was warm and sated, full belly and post-orgasm haze lulling him back to sleep. His arms tightened around Ronan and he said, “Stay.” 

Instead of making fun of him like Adam thought he might, Ronan smiled, a rare sweet one. He said, “I’ll be back. With coffee.”

Adam pulled Ronan close enough that he was lying partially on top of him, made himself more comfortable, shut his eyes. He said, “Stay and make coffee.”

He felt Ronan’s laugh and his hand came to rest on top of Adam’s. “Oh, sure. What the hell am I, your personal delivery service? Want me to get you anything else, you lazy fuck?”

Adam thought about it and smiled into the pillow of Ronan’s chest. “Cake.” 

“ _ Cake? _ It’s like 8 am.”

“Fuck you, you asked.”

Ronan snorted. “Cake it is.” He wriggled until his arm was wrapped around Adam’s back and kissed his forehead. “Sleep. I’ll wake you for brunch.” 

***

It had been a week since the day they had spent wrapped up in each other, food and sex alternating and combining and leaving Adam wrung-out, well-fed and well-fucked. Adam had thought that things, after that, would have changed. 

They hadn’t, and that was mostly Adam’s fault. He’d picked up a lot of overtime at Boyd’s since one of the other employees was on vacation, and he’d been staying, most nights, at St. Agnes, rather than at the Barns. Ronan had stayed with him a couple of times, but Adam hadn’t had the energy for much of anything other than eating and sleeping. 

They hadn’t talked about it, either, which was hardly a surprise, and Adam was almost glad for it—for the space it afforded him to consider what it was, exactly, that they were doing. 

But they were running out of time. In another short week, Ronan would be driving him to Boston. To Harvard. The thought of it was thrilling and terrifying. The feeling of achievement, the start of a new life, combined sickeningly with the reality that there were parts of his life, now, that he wanted so badly to hold on to, that he no longer knew how to go without. 

How much longer would it take for them to untangle this, when they would only see each other every few months? Adam wasn’t done exploring it, not by a long shot, and he was getting a little frantic to get as much out of being together as they could, while he was still here. 

But talking about it would mean making it real, bringing it out into the daylight. Every single aspect of vocalizing his feelings and ideas about this filled him with embarrassment. It was so good right now, so easy to just let the tide take them, but he was worried that given some time apart, they would slide back to how things were before. 

It wasn’t that things weren’t good before, but they'd made so much progress. Adam loved that he’d unlocked this in Ronan, that he was the one that got to give him everything he wanted. If they went back to that subtle, secret dance, timid and held back, he’d have to work to get Ronan to open back up. He would do it, though, if he had to—again and again and again. 

But he wouldn’t have to, if they had more time. 

Adam was underneath a pickup truck that had seen better days. The space felt claustrophobic, still, even though he’d lifted the truck up higher than he had ever needed to. He used to be thin enough that he would hardly need to lift the cars up at all, but today he’d felt his belly brush periodically against the underside of the truck while he was trying to work. 

His nostrils were filled with the scent of grease and gasoline and rust, the migraine that had been pulsing in his temples all day surging and insistent. Cicadas screamed from the trees outside and shitty, staticky country music hissed from the radio. He was dripping sweat even with his coveralls tied around his waist and the industrial-sized fan pulled as close to him as he could get it. The skin on the small of his back where his t-shirt had ridden up was sticking unpleasantly to the creeper underneath him.

He swam in hazy, muggy Virginia heat and he sighed, closed his eyes for a moment, and another moment, and in a sudden burst, like a dam breaking, Adam was filled with  _ awareness _ , with visions of green, of life, and trees and vines, rivers and streams. Miles and miles of wilderness under his fingertips, cascading behind his eyelids. 

He didn’t know how long he laid there, just looking, feeling, halfway into a trance, clinging to it. It had been so long. There were indecipherable murmurs in his ears—both of them—a cool breeze rustling across his skin like a gentle, excitable hello.

Someone grabbed Adam’s ankles and pulled him out from under the truck, too quickly for him to react. He flailed his legs, trying to break the person’s grip, when he was faced with the wild, triumphant grin of Ronan Lynch, crouched on the ground, hovering over him. 

He looked elated in a way that was almost startling. Adam had gotten used to seeing him content, even joyful, but this was different. He was incandescent with it, crackling with unnamable power, godlike and haloed in the warm summer light streaming in from the open garage door behind him. He was overwhelmingly beautiful and sharply in focus. 

Adam vascilated from panic to anger to awe nearly faster than he could track, but he managed a halfhearted shove to Ronan’s chest. “You did it,” Adam said. 

“I did.” 

He sat up, grabbing Ronan’s tank top. “Ronan, you fucking did it.” 

Ronan pulled him up from the ground, but stayed in his space, backing him against the truck. 

“You feel it?” Ronan asked. 

“ _ Yes. _ ”

Adam’s whole body felt electric, like the power that fueled Ronan was catching, and maybe it was. Or maybe it was Cabeswater, pumping him with energy and life. Was there a difference?

Relief choked him, suddenly. There had been a not-insignificant chance that Adam’s own connection to Cabeswater had been severed when it had sacrificed itself, but here it was—Adam’s hands and eyes, like it never left. 

Adam had missed it so badly. 

Ronan dragged his lips over his throat and Adam sucked in a breath. He glanced around the garage, checking the doors, grasping at the reality of where he was, how careful he needed to be even if all he wanted was to sink into Ronan’s dreams. “Ronan,” he said, meaning for it to sound like a rebuke instead of a breathless, desperate plea. 

“Fuck,” Ronan sighed with his mouth still touching skin. 

“Fuck,” Adam said. He framed Ronan’s face in both hands and dove in for a brutal, consuming kiss. 

It had been so long he’d forgotten what it was like, the first few times they kissed, before Cabeswater disappeared. And he hadn’t had anything to compare it to, then. 

Now, he did. He had spent a significant portion of the last few months kissing Ronan Lynch. In that time, Ronan had kissed him in a thousand different ways. Thrilling, like touching a livewire, intense, gentle, affectionate, casual, longing. 

This kiss was sinking beneath Ronan’s skin, burrowing into his body, into his soul, both of them exploding with life and magic and some intrinsic connection that linked them together: Adam and Ronan and Cabeswater. 

“Ronan,” he said, breaking away. He opened his eyes and checked again to see if anyone was around. He felt reckless, but he shoved Ronan back a step and said, “Some of us have to work, you know.  _ Shit _ .”

Ronan reached out to play with the trailing sleeves of the coveralls tied at his waist. He said, “Come with us after work. I want you to see it. Fuck. When do you get off?” 

“3:30.” 

“Fine,” Ronan said, impatient and annoyed and understanding. He snuck another kiss and reached behind Adam to grab something off the hood of the truck, shoved it at his chest. 

Adam barely caught it before it dropped to the dirty cement floor. It was a bag of fast food. He rolled his eyes even though Ronan was no longer looking at him and called out to where he was retreating through the open garage door. “You just dreamed up an entire new magical forest, and you still had time to get me lunch, too?”

“Always,” Ronan said, grinning like he was deeply pleased with himself. 

Adam was stripping off his dirty coveralls when he heard the growl of the Camaro pull up to Boyd’s. The sound of it pulsed inside him, clamoring for adventure. It had been so long since the four of them had seen Cabeswater, and though it hadn’t been nearly as long since they’d seen each other, it felt like ages, still. Gansey, Blue, and Henry had finally concluded their criss-cross-country road trip and were in town for a couple of weeks before the next leg of their trip—Venezuela. 

When he’d clocked out and gotten outside, Blue, Ronan, and Gansey were leaning against the Pig. It had been sitting dustily in the parking lot of Monmouth Manufacturing, unmoving, for months, but now it was freshly washed and glittering, lurid orange in the sun. Gansey was golden tan and Blue’s skin was vacation-dark. 

He reached out to tap Gansey’s knuckles with his own and found himself enveloped in a hug from both sides—Blue’s arms wrapped around his waist and then Gansey’s around his shoulders, and it was awkward and far too hot for this and exactly what he needed. Adam had missed them so much he couldn’t stand it. 

Gansey patted him on the back and let him go. Ronan thumped the hood of The Pig and shouted over the roar of the engine, “Get the fuck in, Parrish! Time for some fucking magic!”

Adam had taken off his coveralls, but his white t-shirt was stained with grease and damp with sweat. “Can I go home and change first?”

Ronan looked him up and down, a slow, deliberate once-over. He licked his bottom lip, shot Adam a grin and said, “No.”

Blue smacked him in the stomach with the rings on the back of her hand and he doubled over exaggeratedly. 

“Ow, Sargent, what the hell.”

“Yes,” Gansey said, replying to Adam, “Of course.”

He walked around to the passenger’s side door and climbed into the back seat after Ronan, who, for once, didn’t even put up a fight for shotgun. Ronan took off his boots and sat sideways, threw a leg over his. Adam let his fingers toy with the jagged, torn edges of the holes in Ronan’s jeans and the soft skin underneath, and let Ronan tuck his toes underneath the hang of his belly. 

He was lit up with anticipation, filled to the brim with energy and the call of magic. 

This new Cabeswater was not entirely new to Adam. Before Ronan took it out of his head, he’d scryed into it in brief bursts while Ronan dreamed. Ronan had wanted to make it perfect, had tinkered with it for months, obsessive and neurotic and dedicated. 

He’d loved watching Ronan create—watching his devotion manifest into a living, breathing thing. It had always felt real, because even though it wasn’t physical, it was already alive.

Now, it was physical, too, and Adam could feel  _ everything _ .

It was the same, but different. Wild and overgrown, overwhelmingly green, natural blending seamlessly with the surreal. The trees whispered and Adam let the sound of it flow over him. They were welcoming them. He grinned in a way that stretched his face, joyous and uncontrollable. 

Ronan let Blue and Gansey get ahead of them, keeping a slower pace with Adam by his side. He reached up into a gnarled tree topped with verdant leaves and pulled down a fruit so large Ronan could barely wrap his fingers around it to get a good grip. It was teardrop-shaped, with a glossy magenta skin, and the flesh indented under the pressure of Adam’s fingertips when Ronan passed it off to him. 

He put his lips to the fruit and opened his mouth to take a bite. Sweet nectar dripped down his chin and filled his mouth. It was soft and fragrant and sticky, its juices thick like syrup, and it had a flavor that was somehow familiar, although Adam couldn’t quite remember having tasted anything like it before. 

He realized his eyes had closed in pleasure and he opened them to look at the fruit again. It was a deep, luxurious purple just beneath the skin, and lighter and more vibrant towards the center, the more Adam ate. He devoured it, following behind Ronan, and he discovered that in the center, there was a glass marble the size of a peach pit with dreamy, colorful smoke swirling inside. He pocketed it and jogged to catch up to Ronan.

The fruit had left him ravenous, despite its size and the heaviness of its syrupy flesh, and the fact that Adam had eaten the lunch Ronan had brought him not so very long ago. He eyed Ronan, suspicions on the tip of his tongue, but said nothing. Blue and Gansey were well within earshot and Adam didn’t want to discuss what they’d been doing in front of their friends any more than Ronan did. 

They spent a long time getting to know this new Cabeswater, wandering aimlessly in between Ronans attempts to corral them to show off his favorite spots. They’d drift apart and together, through flowering meadows and bubbling streams and acres and acres of forest.

He eventually led them to a copse of trees in the very center of a large meadow. Inside, it was strange and beautiful—plants like experimental art pieces, pretty, colorful fungi and enormous, bright wildflowers. Adam ran his fingers over the bark of a tree, shining like scales. 

Ronan picked a berry off a vine and it shone translucent in the dappled sunlight. He tossed it into the air and caught it in his mouth, grinned with all of his teeth and said, mid-chew, “Everything in here is edible.”

“What,” Adam said.

“ _ Really _ ,” Gansey said. 

“Yeah, really. Take a look around.”

They all stayed close, but let their eyes roam, taking it in. Gansey cupped his hands delicately around A bright yellow flower and said, “Fascinating.” 

“Oh, Ronan,” Blue said, awestruck and looking up at the boughs of impossible trees. 

Ronan dug his bitten-short fingernails into the bark of the tree Adam had been touching and broke off a piece, tossing it to Gansey, who caught it, just barely, against his chest. 

“You want me to eat this?” Gansey said, doubtfully. 

Ronan rolled his eyes and peeled off another piece to give to Blue. “It’s not like it’s fucking poisonous, Dick. I made it.” 

Blue held the bark to her face and wrinkled her nose. “I think I’m with Gansey on this one.”

Ronan pulled off one more piece and held it to Adam’s lips. Unthinking, trusting, Adam opened his mouth and took a bite. He felt, suddenly, bizarrely, as if he were receiving communion like he’d seen Ronan and his brothers do during Mass. The bark was sweet and strange and impossible, and it crunched between his teeth like a thin layer of crystallized sugar, but the inside was flaky, buttery. 

Blue and Gansey hesitated, waiting for Adam’s reaction. 

“ _ What, _ ” Adam said. He pulled off another piece and shoved it in his mouth and Ronan grinned at him, blindingly bright. He swallowed and said, “Sorry. Shit, that’s good.”

“What’s it like?” Gansey asked. 

“Good,” Adam repeated. “Sweet. Like a cookie or a pastry maybe.”

“Hmm.” 

Tentatively, Gansey placed the edge of the bark in between his teeth and took a bite. Blue eyed him warily for a moment, before shoving a piece in her mouth, too. Adam watched both of their faces transform, simultaneously, melting in pleasure and relief. 

“Wow, Lynch,” Blue said. “I did not expect that.” 

Ronan looked incredibly arrogant, grin still plastered to his face. “Good, right?”

“Fantastic,” Gansey said. “Truly.”

“Why do you both sound so surprised?” Adam said. “Ronan makes dream food all the time, it’s not like it would be so different, here.” 

Gansey’s eyes widened. “Does he, now?”

“Yeah, you know.” Adam could feel heat creep across his ears. He suddenly wasn’t sure they  _ did _ know. It was more than possible that Adam had been the only recipient of those gifts. “Just, uh, sometimes.” 

Blue turned on Ronan, placing her hands on her hips. “He hasn’t given any to  _ me. _ ”

Ronan reached out an arm to gesture, sarcastically, to the forest around them, “The fuck am I doing now, then? Don’t get greedy, Sargent.” 

Gansey was looking at Adam, thumb brushing his lip, and Adam was resolutely avoiding his eyes. After an uncomfortable moment, Gansey turned to Ronan and said, “Well, what would you recommend, chef?” 

“So glad you asked.” Ronan took a running jump in the opposite direction, grabbed the lowest branch of a nearby tree and heaved himself up. 

“What are you doing?” Adam yelled up at him. He was making his way up the tree at a quick, practiced pace. He didn’t answer immediately, so Adam took another handful of the bark while he watched Ronan climb. Without warning, he tossed a fruit at their feet, and then another. 

Adam picked one up as Ronan continued to drop them. The skin shone like they were leafed in gold, perfectly round, about the size of Adam’s fist. It had a satisfying weight in the palm of his hand. He bit into it and immediately spit it onto the ground. Ronan’s delighted cackle split the air and he jumped down from the tree, grinning at him. 

Gansey was staring down at the golden balls around their feet in horror, but Adam took another bite. 

Alarmed, Blue said, “Adam!” 

The gold fruit was the exact flavor of macaroni and cheese, and oddly it was actually delicious, once he got past the unexpected shock of it and the slight difference in texture. “That’s vile,” Adam said, smiling. 

“Don’t fucking lie to me, man, they’re awesome. Like mac and cheese balls that grow on trees. Who wouldn’t want that?” 

“I thought it was a  _ fruit. _ ”

“That’s on you for making assumptions.”

Adam had never eaten mac and cheese balls, but he ate two of those gold things, while Blue and Gansey nibbled theirs with a healthy amount of trepidation. Before Adam could pick up another, Ronan sidled up next to his hearing ear and said, “Try something else.” 

Adam shivered at the rush of breath on his skin, looked between Ronan and the forest. Trees towered over them, sagging under the weight of plump, colorful fruits, their leaves iridescent and crystalline, all mysterious, all entirely edible. Adam’s mouth watered. 

On the fallen log he stood next to, there was a neon-bright, fluffy moss. He glanced back at Ronan to find the smile in his eyes fighting for control of his mouth, too. 

“That one’s not bad,” he said. “If I do say so myself.” 

Adam brought it to his lips. It melted strangely on his tongue, like cotton candy, and the flavor was rich, heady, and sweet. “Not bad,” he sighed. 

Ronan held something behind his back. He said, “Open your mouth.”

Adam did, and he let Ronan place a tiny, honey-sweet flower onto his tongue. He felt Ronan’s fingertips trace the bare skin of his sensitive lower belly as he did, and his eyes slipped shut. It was so easy to get caught in Ronan’s orbit. His every movement, every word, even just his still presence demanded attention, and even before they were friends, Adam had been annoyingly compelled by it. 

So it took a few moments of this for Adam to realize where they were, and more importantly who they were with. Adam grabbed Ronan’s wrist. “What the hell are you doing? Gansey and Blue are  _ right there. _ ”

“I really don’t give a fuck, Parrish. Let them catch us.”

Ronan darted in for a quick kiss, but before he could pull away, Adam kissed him again, again, again. 

Blue shouted, “Ew, PDA!” 

Ronan pulled one hand away from him, and Adam didn’t have to look to know he was giving her the finger. He looked anyway, and found Blue laughing and Gansey smiling and Ronan blushing. Adam snorted and shoved Ronan back a step. 

He said, “Show me your favorite.”

Ronan took him by the hand and led him to a skeletal, spindly tree with dark, leathery bark. He reached up into the leaves and pulled down a small, spiky seed pod by the stem. It looked too sharp to touch and it was so dark Adam could barely see it, as if it didn’t reflect light. A black hole. Ronan placed it in Adam’s palm. It was heavy and the pinpricks of the spikes dug into his skin, but they weren’t sharp enough to puncture it without more pressure. 

Ronan touched the tip of his finger very delicately to the sides of the spikes and they bent obediently out of his way. He dug his thumbnail into the skin and it split open with a crack. Blinding golden light and warmth spilled over his hands and over the planes of Ronan’s face. 

Ronan finished peeling off the skin and Adam held the sun in the palm of his hand. He watched Adam appraise it for a long moment and finally lift it to his mouth. It was incongruously cool on his tongue, and malleable like a drop of water held into a sphere by surface tension. Adam bit down and felt it break in his mouth and slide down his throat. 

It tasted like summer storms, bonfires, and balmy, humid nights tangled in someone else’s sweaty skin. Like the roar of an engine careening down an empty highway, frantic kisses and a sudden, sharp bite of joyous laughter. Like standing on the knife’s edge of potential between success and disaster, taking a leap of faith and freefalling into the unknown. 

It tasted like an idea. Like a dream. Nothing and Everything.

He opened his eyes. 

“Ronan,” he said. He felt pressure in his throat and behind his eyes like unshed tears. 

The wary, vulnerable cast over Ronan’s face melted into a smile. He grabbed Adam’s hand again, led him to a bush littered with tiny, glittering berries. 

Adam ate, and ate. Blue and Gansey had wandered off after a few minutes, but Adam was too enchanted by this place to leave, too enchanted by the lightness of Ronan’s mood and the blue eyes that followed his every move. His breath had gotten shallow and his stomach felt tight, but he wanted to taste  _ everything.  _

When he got tired, he collapsed into the center of the copse, on a bed of soft moss. Ronan flitted around, restlessly, picking up things for Adam to try. Fruits and flowers and leafy branches. 

Adam had a stick in his mouth and Ronan snorted and said, “You look like Opal.”

“God. We probably shouldn’t bring her here. She has enough weird eating habits without this complicating things.”

“At least this is actual food.”

“More or less.” He took a bite off the branch, letting it crunch satisfyingly between his teeth. 

Ronan held a handful of blueish lichen to Adam’s lips and his brow furrowed, thoughtfully. “Do you think dream food has nutritional value?” 

Adam chewed through the lichen and said, “I sure as hell hope so, I’ve been practically living off of it for months.”

“Come on, Parrish, I do feed you real food from time to time.” 

More and more, recently. Adam wouldn’t admit that those were often his favorite meals. Dreaming came naturally to Ronan, but cooking didn’t. Though he had a gift for flavor, he was impatient and easily frustrated. He often let things burn or else he’d dump it down the sink if it wasn’t going how he wanted so they’d have to pick up takeout instead. But Adam liked knowing that Ronan had worked so hard to improve at this, for him. He could almost feel devotion saturated into every bite. 

“You’re getting pretty good at it,” Adam said, not quite meeting Ronan’s eyes. 

Ronan smiled, just exactly as bright as the inside of the spiky seed pod. He kissed Adam’s cheek and handed him some more lichen. It tasted like cinnamon sugar. 

“I fucking better be, it’s been almost a whole goddamn year.”

Adam thought back a whole goddamn year and drawled, “Did you start cookin’ for me?”

Ronan stilled. “My mom used to make us help her, sometimes. With easy things. Never really had the patience for it.” Adam snorted. “Never had a reason to try, before.”

“Oh,” Adam’s heart was fluttering and he didn’t know how to meet that truth with a truth of his own, so he said, “I’m sure Gansey would have appreciated it.”

Ronan laughed and stood up. “Yeah, I’m sure he would have.”

Adam watched him gather a generous handful of twisting orange mushrooms and wondered what they would taste like. He knew he should stop eating, that he was getting full. The pressure in his stomach was undeniable, but he was insatiable with want and a phantom hunger that kept pushing and pushing. He needed to taste everything. It was like being high without the high, his sense of pain dampened and appetite dialed up to eleven. 

“Ronan,” Adam said, carefully, his breath labored with the press of his full stomach against his lungs. He gestured around him. “Does any of this have… psychoactive properties? Or—”

Ronan paused for a moment and spun around to face him. “What do you think, I’m trying to  _ drug you? _ Holy fuck, Adam.”

“No, God, of course not. I just meant…” He rubbed his stomach and it felt spectacularly bloated and suspiciously painless. 

“Spit it out, Parrish.”

“I feel like… When I ate that first fruit you gave me. The big purple one. It didn’t… satisfy me, like I thought it would.”

Ronan collapsed onto the ground in front of him. “No?”

“No, it was like… It just made me hungrier. It still feels like I could just keep eating. Forever.”

Ronan’s face was difficult to read, a mess of clashing emotions. “Well, shit. As far as I know, that’s all you.”

Adam ate one of the mushrooms. “Okay, I mean. That’s good to know.”

Ronan hissed, “For the record, there are things in Cabeswater with goddamn ‘psychoactive properties,’ but not in here, and I’d fucking tell you if you were taking some kind of like… appetite stimulant. Christ.”

“I was just  _ asking. _ ” Adam flushed badly enough that he could feel it. Even talking about this in a roundabout way was more than he could take. He felt like his heart would burst. He took a deep breath and said, “I trust you.”

“Do you?”

“ _ Yes.” _

“Okay. Well, clearly the food is just that good.” 

Adam rolled his eyes. “Don’t you think, maybe, it could have effects like that, even if you didn’t mean for it to?”

Ronan rubbed a hand over the back of his head. “I guess it’s possible. Sometimes it’s hard to… contain everything. There could have been some unintended side effects or some shit.”

“Hm.”

“But I wouldn’t do that on purpose, not without telling you.”

Adam wrapped his hand around Ronan’s. “I know.”

So many things went unsaid, but Adam could read between the lines. It was strangely thrilling to have even the vague specter of this out in the open. The implication that stimulating Adam’s appetite was something of interest to Ronan. 

“So,” Ronan said, all casual. “Are you still hungry, then?” 

Adam bit his lip and thought about it. He felt filled to the brim. He felt like his stomach was a vast, yawning chasm. Unfillable. It was dangerous, maybe, to eat so much without the pain to tell him when to stop. 

“Yeah,” he said. “I could eat.”

Ronan looked him over, eyes hooked on his belly for a long, simmering moment. Adam looked, too, and was mortified, elated to see just how obviously full he was. How much he’d glutted himself and how clear it would be to Blue and Gansey when they found them again. 

Ronan said, “Even after all that?”

“Yeah,” Adam said, spurred on by Ronan’s interest. “Pass me one of those green things.”

“Jesus shit, you weren’t kidding, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t.”

Ronan passed him one of those green things. He got up again and came back with an armful of plants, dropped them on the ground beside Adam. He picked up another mushroom, blue this time, and paused for a moment with it held it between his fingers. He turned to Adam, whose mouth was full, and waited for him to swallow. 

Ronan reached out and placed the mushroom to Adam’s lips, and he opened his mouth to take it, his eyes locked on Ronan’s, his hands curling into moss and dirt, his brain screaming  _ yes, yes, yes.  _

He leaned forward to capture another from between Ronan’s fingers before he’d even finished chewing and the pressure behind his ribs became suffocating. He paused and let his eyes drift shut, placed a bracing hand on the crest of his stomach, and burped. He had enough warning to trap the second and third burps behind his fist. Adam found relief in the freeing up of space inside him and opened his eyes. 

“Fuck,” Ronan licked his lips. His fingers drifted towards Adam, to brush his belly, ever so gently. “Do you think we should stop?”

Adam shook his head, adamant even thought he’d been thinking the same thing only a few minutes ago. He wanted more. “What else—“ Adam had to pause to gasp in a breath. “—haven’t I tried?” 

“Fuck, you’re greedy,” Ronan growled, and then caught himself, eyes going wide. 

Before he could course-correct, Adam said, “Yeah. Bring me more, Ronan.” 

Ronan nodded absently, eyes glazed over. “You’re un-fucking-believable.”

Ronan kissed him once, twice, and then his lips were replaced by the leafy stalk of some kind of plant. Adam ate, losing track, at some point, of just how much. 

Adam was dizzy with overindulgence, intoxicated with it. He could hardly breathe around the mass inside him, belly heavy in his lap. He belched, feebly, and murmured, “God, okay. I’m done. I’m done.” 

Ronan dropped whatever he was holding and crowded into Adam’s space with a smile stretching his cheeks. He wrapped his hands around Adam’s face. “You have no idea how fucking unreal you are, do you?” 

Adam couldn’t take it—he kissed him, heated, demanding. It burned all the way through him, and he tugged at Ronan until he was climbing into his lap, straddling him and grinding against him, messy and perfect. 

Ronan broke away to suck in a series of ragged breaths, his forehead pressed against Adam’s. He said, “Jesus fucking Mary, Adam. What are you trying to do to me, huh? How the hell am I supposed to face Gansey, now? I won’t be able to think about anything but fucking devouring you.”

Adam let out a shaky breath. He said, “Do it, then.”

“What? Now?”

He was sure it would be excruciating having to endure the pulsing need under his skin until they left Cabeswater, left Blue and Gansey, gone somewhere private. He needed something now. He needed everything. “They’re not here. Come on,” he begged. “Please.”

Ronan’s mouth was on his in an instant, his kiss a needy and overflowing thing. He pushed Adam back until he was leaning against a mossy boulder and climbed over him, caging him in. “We should be quick,” he said, his voice shaking. 

“Yeah,” Adam said. There was no way it wouldn’t be quick, not for him. The way Ronan held himself told Adam that he wasn’t much better off. “I know. I just want…” 

“Yeah,” Ronan breathed, quiet in the narrow space between them. He tilted his face so they were cheek-to-cheek, and trailed kisses across his jaw, his neck, the hollow of his throat. “Fuck, Adam.”

Ronan lifted his t-shirt so he could kiss his way down Adam’s chest, his lips skating past his nipples and instead sinking into the softness right around them. Adam was vibrating, needy, biting back pleas and broken sounds. 

Wet kisses dropped down Adam’s sternum, down to the heavy jut of his belly that, even lying down, looked enormously swollen. Adam gasped. Every cell in his body had woken at the touch. His heart was rioting in his chest. 

“ _ Please, _ ” Adam begged, broken already. “Christ, Ronan, please.”

Ronan looked up and said, “Please, what?” 

Adam opened his mouth, his breath coming out harsh and uneven. He didn’t say anything. 

Ronan’s hand drifted down from Adam’s stomach to the button of his jeans. “Do you want me to touch you?” 

“ _ Yes. _ ” He said, “No, wait. I just.” Adam couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t tell Ronan what he wanted. He pushed Ronan’s head down, down, until his face brushed his belly, again. Ronan’s eyes fluttered shut and he shuddered, violently. “Ronan,” Adam pleaded. 

Ronan opened his mouth, touched his tongue to Adam’s skin, made a ragged sound in the back of his throat, and Adam’s mind went white. 

“Oh,” Adam said in a breathless whisper. “Oh, fuck.”

Ronan’s lips and tongue were unbearably hot and greedy, his face sinking into Adam’s belly, and Adam was squirming, writhing, his chest heaving with strangled breaths. 

Every swipe of Ronan’s tongue shocked his body like a loose electrical wire—every desperate drag of his lips like a forest fire scorching the earth. 

It unmoored him so completely that every inch of his body began pulsing with unnameable power, the ley line flooding his system. Adam surrendered to it, to Ronan, and he realized that he was moaning brokenly only when Ronan shushed him, convulsing with suppressed laughter. He said, “Shut the fuck up, before Gansey and Sargent hear you.”

Adam opened his mouth to say something that he was sure would have been clever, but Ronan had already latched back onto his stomach, sucking like a fucking vampire, and a breathy, anguished sound poured out, instead. He slammed his forearm over his mouth to gag himself, which gave him the benefit of not having to watch the beautiful, stricken expression on Ronan’s face partially enveloped in his belly fat or deal with the way it made him feel to see it. 

Ronan’s hands came up to frame Adam’s stomach—the pressure filled mass of it—his fingers testing the limits of its give while his mouth was eating Adam alive. 

Adam was quaking, cracking like a dam about to burst from too much pressure. 

He was so full. 

Ronan’s hands dipped down to his love handles, grasping and pulling Adam closer. He moaned and licked into Adam’s belly button and the sensation was strange and a little ticklish and it flooded him with pleasure, sent waves of it straight to Adam’s cock. 

“Ah! Ah,” Adam cried out, his hands grasping at his own hair and his eyes shut tight. “Ronan, I need—“

Ronan pulled off with a wet, slick sound and Adam whined, slid a hand around the back of Ronan’s head to push him back where he belonged, but he resisted at the last moment. 

“I know,” Ronan growled. “I know what you need, Adam.” 

Ronan kissed his belly with sloppy, artless enthusiasm and popped the fly on Adam’s jeans. Adam lifted his hips to help Ronan pull them down to his thighs and to grind up into Ronan’s kisses. 

Ronan’s tongue dipped low, down to the underside of his belly where it had just begun to drop, to hang over his waistband when he was standing. Adam jolted, hypersensitive and overstimulated from barely anything. Ronan hadn’t even touched him yet.  _ Oh, Christ, _ he thought, Ronan was going to touch him. 

He licked at the crease where the waistband of Adam’s jeans had left a red ring of stinging indents in his skin and then lower, to the base of his cock. 

Adam was panting, suffocating, the contents of his stomach pressing all the way up to his throat. He had barely enough breath to push out a strangled whine when Ronan licked up the underside of his cock all the way to the tip and then his belly and back to his cock in rapid succession. 

It was too much. He wanted more. He grasped onto the back of Ronan’s shirt and the back of his head and anything he could reach to keep himself grounded, to keep from coming apart. He choked back an agonized sound and his body rushed with heat, his pulse thundering in his ears. 

Ronan groaned and surged into him like  _ this _ was his indulgence, like he was savoring it the way Adam had savored everything Ronan had given him. His mouth was frenzied, messy and wet and incapable of making up its mind where it wanted to be. Adam could feel the vibrations of near-silent moans on Ronan’s tongue. It shouldn’t have been enough to get him off, not with just the inconsistent tease of his mouth, but he could feel himself tense, could feel the build of it in the pit of his stomach. 

Ronan’s teeth scraped the underside of his belly and his cheek pressed against Adam’s cock. A shudder ripped through him. The bite stung and his skin throbbed with the blood rising to just under the surface. Ronan kissed it for a moment, gentle and chaste, before soothing it with his tongue. Adam cried out behind the safety of his hand and he came, shaking in Ronan’s arms, wrapped in overwhelming pleasure. 

The world stilled, the cacophony of it quieting down to a dull hum. Ronan was still kissing his stomach—lazy, indulgent kitten licks. 

When he managed to open his eyes, he had to adjust to the brightness of the sun before he was able to see Ronan collapsed on top of him. He ran his fingers across the back of Ronan’s skull and they tripped across something unexpected. Adam sat up to see better and found vines looped over Ronan’s neck and wound around both arms, threaded through his fingers and binding him to the mossy earth and to Adam’s body. 

As soon as he thought it, the vines lost their tension, untangled themselves and flopped uselessly to the ground. Adam reached for Ronan’s face and turned it up to look at him. “Shit, Ronan, I’m so sorry.”

Ronan’s grin was loose and a little unhinged, his eyes glassy and pupils blown wide and black. “Jesus God, Adam. Shut up.” His hands came back to rest on Adam’s hips and his fingers tensed and flexed. He said, “If I wanted out, I would’ve fuckin’ told you.”

Adam reached out a finger to trace the red marks on his wrists. “It doesn’t matter, I could’ve—”

Ronan sat up. Between kisses he said, “Shut. Up. Fucking relax, okay?” He kissed Adam hard and fast and brain-melting. “Anyway, if you wanted to try bondage, you could’ve just asked.”

Adam rolled his eyes. What a hypocrite. As if it was so easy. Just  _ ask _ . If it were that easy, Ronan would have done it by now, instead of—all of this. Thinly veiled intentions and excuses and distractions. He could have just said—what?  _ Hey, Parrish, I want to make you fat, sound cool? _

God, what would Adam have said if he had? 

“I wasn’t—” Adam stammered, “It was an accident, I wasn’t trying to do—bondage. Jesus.”

“I know. You were just so caught up in the incredible pleasure I was giving you that you lost control and manifested some fucking plants. Perfectly understandable.”

“Stop sounding so goddamn smug, Lynch. It won’t happen again.”

“Fucking shame.” He grinned. “I kinda liked it.”

“You— _ what? _ ”

“You heard me.”

Adam fought to reconcile a Ronan that would be so blunt and direct about something like this, but still, after  _ months _ , had yet to confront this other thing between them. 

He felt Ronan start to shift, like he was getting up or moving away. Adam said, “Hey, wait.” He reached down to Ronan’s fly. “Let me—“ he cut himself off when he felt a patch of wet denim. “Oh.”

“Already taken care of.” 

Adam thought about Ronan coming from just the friction of the ground and the feeling of Adam’s body, and maybe, even, the restraints around his wrists. “Oh,” he said.

That was the moment reality set in. They were both covered in come, wet and sticky, and their friends were nearby. They were going to have to face them, like this. Ronan’s face went pensive. He sprang to his feet and held out a hand to Adam. “Come on,” he said. 

“Why,” Adam whined. His belly protested the movement of just sitting up and he burped, loudly. 

Ronan laughed. “We gotta wash up, man, get up.”

Adam let Ronan heave him to his feet and was surprised to find that he wasn’t in any pain, still. But he felt heavy and slow, his gait a little off from compensating for the weight of his belly. He followed Ronan, hand clasped in his, and Ronan slowed his stride so they could walk side-by-side. 

Ronan led him to a crystalline lake being fed by a tiny waterfall and waded into the shallows. 

“No,” Adam said, digging in his heels before his shoes could get wet. 

“Gotta hide the evidence somehow, babe.” 

Adam laughed. “ _ Babe?  _ Did you just call me  _ babe? _ ”

Ronan’s face scrunched up in annoyance or embarrassment or both. His hand shot out and Adam was too sluggish to be able to jump back in time not to be dragged into the lake with an immense splash. 

Adam surfaced, sputtering, and Ronan was laughing, wild and free. Adam tackled him into the water. 

They grasped at wet skin, grappling and trying to push each other in, and when that failed, splashed water in each other’s faces until Adam was too spent and out of breath from laughter to continue. His belly buoyed in the water with every movement and the rest of his body quivered in tandem. 

He wanted Ronan to feel it, too, so he slid into his space, pressed his back to Ronan’s chest and waited for the inevitability of Ronan’s arms wrapping around his middle. 

Ronan’s hands on his stomach were gentle and firm. Adam felt a burp rumble up to his throat and it was too much for him to be able to cover the sound. “Shit,” he said. “Excuse me.” And then, in the absence of eye contact, it was easy for him to continue, “I don’t know if dream food has nutritional value, but it sure seems to have a high fat content.”

He spun in Ronan’s arms so he could see his face. Ronan rubbed a hand over the back of his neck and avoided Adam’s eyes and kept his mouth shut. Feeling brave, Adam asked, “Do you make it that way?”

Ronan paused and bit his bottom lip. Adam had the overwhelming urge to bite it, himself, but before he could, Ronan said, “I don’t know. Not… on purpose.”

“An accident then, like your purple appetite stimulants.” 

Ronan’s eyes met his, suddenly, alight with something that resembled fury, but Adam knew it was closer to embarrassment and defiance and hiding. He grunted. “Maybe.”

“Coincidence,” Adam said, because it wasn’t. He tried to hold back the smile that threatened to take over his whole face, but Ronan saw it, anyway. 

His face was suddenly very serious and Adam nearly thought he was going to own up to it, finally. Say something like,  _ you know it isn’t. _

He said, “Shut up, you sound like Gansey.” 

Adam let him have it. “Speaking of…” he wrapped his arms around Ronan’s shoulders and said, “We should try to find them.”

But Ronan’s eyes were caught on Adam’s lips. He said, “Mhm.”

“Ronan,” he chastised, pulling him back towards the shore. 

Ronan kissed him, deep and searching. Adam’s knees started to buckle under his weight. 

And then he heard Blue’s voice call out, “Adam! Lynch!” 

She was close. Startled, they sprang apart, and Blue and Gansey rounded the corner just as Adam was pulling his shirt down. Ronan looked debauched, flushed and wet with kiss-bitten lips. Adam was certain he looked worse. 

“Gross, again?” Blue said. 

“Really, gentlemen,” Gansey added, smiling, “Let’s keep it professional.”

Adam ducked his head and swiped a hand through his wet hair. Ronan said, “Please. You expect me to believe you two kept it ‘professional’ while you’ve been gone?” 

Blue dropped Gansey’s hand and huffed, “You didn’t catch us, and you have no proof.” 

“Oh, no? The massive hickey on Dick’s neck says otherwise.”

Blue huffed, but a proud smile tugged at her lips. Gansey covered the hickey with his hand and flushed pink. He said, “That’s quite enough of that. Come on, you two, there’s still so much to see.”

Gansey led the way and the three of them followed without argument. 

Adam felt the moment they stepped out of Cabeswater because his stomach cramped painfully enough that he nearly doubled over. It was as if the purple fruit’s effects were frozen by the timelessness of the forest. God, why had he eaten so much? 

He was lagging behind the others already, enough that they didn’t notice him stopping to lean against a tree and brace a hand against his aching belly. 

When Ronan eventually looked back, Adam started walking again, a slow and uneasy pace. Ronan stood still until he’d caught up and then linked his fingers with Adam’s. He said, “How’s the gut?” 

Adam breathed as deeply as he dared and forced out, “Peachy,” which was immediately followed by a strangled burp. 

“Yeah, you seem fuckin’ swell.” Ronan snorted. “Think you can make it?” 

“I’ll manage.” 

The Camaro wasn’t far. It was only a few minutes until they made it back to where they’d parked and Adam was safe to sit and try to recover. He rested his head on Ronan’s shoulder and let the rumble of the Pig lull him into a dreamless sleep. 

***

Ronan drove Adam up to Harvard in August. He helped move him into his dorm room, spent the night crammed into Adam’s twin-size bed, and left the next day. Adam had expected the emptiness that followed the absence of Ronan, because he had started to miss him before he’d even left home _. _


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It would have made sense that this fixation would fade with Ronan’s absence. After all, this wasn’t _Adam’s_ thing, and what would be the point if there was no one to show, no one to tease or appreciate it? He had figured that, over time, he would reset to his normal baseline, and once it became clear that he wasn’t getting anything out of it, he wouldn’t be quite so indulgent, quite so often, quite so fervently. 
> 
> It had been weeks since Adam had gotten to Harvard and so far there hadn’t been a single day where he hadn’t taken advantage of his meal plan to the fullest extent that his schedule and his appetite would allow. Today had been no exception. 

Adam had assumed that without Ronan’s relentless, persistent encouragement being a fixture in his day to day life, that he wouldn’t overeat like he had been. He had been prepared for the possibility of losing some weight, even. 

It took him all of one day before he found himself in one of the buffet-style dining halls, eyeing the spread with a grumbling stomach. His eyes darted around the room, overwhelmed with how unlimited it seemed. Even just looking made him salivate—made him lightheaded. 

He thought of Ronan and how if he’d been there, he would have pushed Adam into cramming his plates full. He would have picked up heaping piles of food that were ostensibly for himself, but he’d manage to push the vast majority onto Adam, anyway. How full could Ronan make him in a place like this?

But Ronan wasn’t there. He had already driven home, and it was just Adam—alone, because his roommate Fletcher had class for another hour and Adam wasn’t used to that gnawing pit of hunger anymore. He couldn’t wait. Or didn’t want to. 

So even without Ronan there to see, Adam let himself have whatever he wanted. There was no reason to do so, but, then, there was also no reason not to. He filled his tray with breakfast foods in a dizzying reminder of the first time Ronan had really fed him. He picked up a little of everything—coffee and coffee cake, eggs, bacon, crepes, pancakes, croissants. 

And even though he didn’t specifically do it to impress Ronan, he found himself wanting to text him about it. He didn’t know what to say, though, and he was hesitant to break the unspoken truce they had, about not acknowledging this with too many words. He didn’t want to draw more attention to it than he had already, in case it made Ronan back off. So ultimately, all he said was, _the dining hall is really good._

It wasn’t “really good” so much as it was paid for and unlimited and more than Adam had ever really had access to on his own, but he thought Ronan would get that, anyway. 

He ate until he’d emptied the tray and his jeans cut into his waist, until his stomach was swollen. Adam had to walk to his next class at a pace slow enough that it would have made him late if he hadn’t left early for that very reason. 

But even still, he brushed it off, certain that, with time and distance, after his stomach shrank back to the size of a normal person’s, he would eventually stop. 

***

Adam draped himself across his bed, groaning pitifully. He couldn’t help it. He was so full his own stomach pressed down on him like a weight. He shifted onto his side to let the mattress support its heft, and felt relief with a side of vague, detached shame for getting to this point, again. 

It was basic classical conditioning, Adam thought. Eating more than he needed to meant Ronan would want to have sex, and so, over time, Adam began to associate the feeling of a tight, full belly with the possibility of it. His mind had hard-wired food and fat and sex together, inextricably. 

This was part of it, Adam knew, and such a large and obvious part that for a long time, that was all he had seen. He’d assumed that it had everything to do with Ronan, and not Adam, himself. Not really. 

But it was clear to him, now, that there was more to it than that. Ronan was hundreds of miles away and he wouldn’t see the state Adam was in, wouldn’t be there to bring him more, kiss him, touch him. 

It would have made sense that this fixation would fade with Ronan’s absence. After all, this wasn’t _Adam’s_ thing, and what would be the point if there was no one to show, no one to tease or appreciate it? He had figured that, over time, he would reset to his normal baseline, and once it became clear that he wasn’t getting anything out of it, he wouldn’t be quite so indulgent, quite so often, quite so fervently. 

It had been weeks since Adam had gotten to Harvard and so far there hadn’t been a single day where he hadn’t taken advantage of his meal plan to the fullest extent that his schedule and his appetite would allow. Today had been no exception. 

No, today had been _particularly_ extravagant. 

He was rubbing circles into his groaning stomach, because he had outdone himself at dinner. There had been fajitas and stir fry and sesame chicken and pad thai and so many side dishes he couldn’t remember them all. 

His new friends, the ones who he sat with periodically at meals, they didn’t know the person who he had been. They wouldn’t comment on how much he was eating because as far as they knew, this was his norm. At Harvard, Adam could be anyone he wanted. He could be a guy who enjoyed food with gusto, who was a little pudgy because of it, and never feel like he was drawing too much attention to himself. 

And if he managed to overdo it enough to where he felt out of place, Adam had found that, if he affected a combination of Gansey-like charisma and Ronan-like shamelessness, he could get away with anything. If he acted like he wasn’t embarrassed, all of a sudden, it wasn’t embarrassing.

So with no fanfare at all, he had gotten up for seconds, and when Gillian showed up, he made the rounds with her, too _—_ sampling the dishes he hadn’t yet tried, piling his tray with a third generous helping, eating and eating long after everyone else had stopped. And when he’d cleaned his last plate, he pushed it away from him and said, “Jesus, I’m full. Let’s go back to the common room before I eat anything else.” 

They’d laughed at him, good-naturedly, and followed his lead. 

He still felt the effects of this excess, even an hour afterwards. It had been _far_ too much. Adam was so incredibly full. 

And yet, a part of him wished he hadn't stopped. He could eat something more, he thought, now that it had a while to settle, now that he was laying on his side and could soothe his stomach with his own hands.

He wanted to touch himself.

He glanced at Fletcher, who was resting on his back and snoring softly, his incredible roundness arching above him, dominating his silhouette in the darkness. A familiar feeling stirred inside him and it took him a few seconds to process it, because it had never been caused by something like this before. 

It wasn’t until he realized that he was picturing himself in Fletcher’s place _—_ surrounded, weighed down by his own body _—_ that it occurred to him. 

Adam had been envious of so many things in his life. For years it’d been an omnipresent force—every single time he was reminded of the money he didn’t have, the time he didn’t have, the comfort he didn’t have, the freedom he didn’t have, the love he didn’t have, the feeling overtook him, sank its claws in and wouldn’t let go.

This was new though, this particular jealousy, and far more mild. More like desire for something he could have, if he wanted it. 

It was a ridiculous thought to throw in with a hundred other ridiculous thoughts. He flipped around to watch the wall next to his bed, instead.

He had the sudden, wild idea that there was nothing stopping him from getting up and walking to the vending machine, or further—to his bike, and then to the 24-hour convenience store a few blocks away—but he dismissed it. Adam was going to have to be smart if he wanted to keep doing this. He couldn’t afford to waste money to satisfy this craving. It was going to take planning and careful budgeting, and relying mostly on his meal plan to keep him fed. 

Adam was beginning to think that eating his fill like this gave a voice to some deep-seated desire that he hadn’t even known was there. Separate from Ronan, it became clear that so many years of never having had enough had impacted him in more ways than he had imagined. The freedom and the satisfaction that came with having was incalculable. He felt driven towards it, even without anyone’s approval, without the possibility of physical intimacy, without anything besides himself. 

***

Adam was in front of the mirror in his and Fletcher’s en-suite bathroom, observing the spherical shape of a belly bloated from an entire day’s worth of overeating. He was wearing a dark grey, stretchy and expensive-soft band t-shirt that Ronan had tossed on the floor, uncaring as he usually was with his own things, but doubly so when it was in the way of him and Adam being skin to skin. It had ended up crumpled under Adam’s bed and forgotten until well after he’d gone home. 

It fit Adam in that it covered him, but didn’t in that it wrapped around his midsection like a second skin—especially as full as he was. After an excessive breakfast, Adam hadn’t even been hungry by lunch, but he ate it, anyway, and then ate some more. The walk to his next class had been brutal, and he’d been out of breath, stomach cramping fitfully by the time he’d made it to the building. 

Neither that, nor the fact that Fletcher and Benjy had joined him, had put him off shoveling back two heaping full trays of food for dinner, again. At least it hadn’t been three, this time. This was becoming a habit, and a difficult one to break when Adam didn’t want to break it very much at all. 

He wished, like he wished every time, that Ronan could see him like this. And then, suddenly, it occurred to him that maybe he could. On impulse, he took his cheap flip-phone from his pocket and opened the camera.

Adam took dozens of photos. He had to experiment with the angles, how much of him could fit in the shot if he used the front-facing camera versus if he used the mirror, shirt or no shirt. There were pictures of him gripping his belly fat and ones taken from the side to show off the harsh curve of a stomach pushed relentlessly overboard, ones where the shirt folded neatly into the rolls at his sides and in the crease between his chest and belly, exposing a sliver of skin just under the hem.

He flipped through them, afterwards, imagined sending them to Ronan, and dropped his phone onto the counter to hide his face in his hands. His ears went hot with embarrassment. 

In the end, he deleted all but one—a shot of his face and torso. The fabric of Ronan’s shirt was stretched tight around his body, but in almost every way it was just a perfectly regular selfie. It toed the line of their game perfectly. 

Barely a minute later, when Adam had crawled into bed with his assigned reading, his phone lit up with a new text. Ronan said, _You stole my shirt? I don’t think they allow criminals at Harvard. You’re lucky you’re so pretty or I’d have to turn you in._

Adam snorted and typed, _I didn’t take you for a rat, Lynch._

_That’s what you get for stretching it out._

The phone started vibrating with an incoming call and his face broke into a smile. He answered and said, “Hey.”

He could hear the matching smile in Ronan’s voice saying, “Hey.” 

***

Adam got bold after that—started sending Ronan pictures with some regularity. His face sometimes, or one hand resting in a notebook, a table littered with books, changing autumn trees and his friends and his life. And scattered throughout, in a way that he hoped came off innocuous, were pictures of indulgent meals. 

Ronan didn’t comment on them often, which annoyed Adam unreasonably, sometimes so much that he would send several in one day, just to provoke him. 

Adam was on the way back to his dorm after just such a day. The night air was chilled and biting at his cheeks, but he left his jacket open, inviting the coolness in to curl around his skin. He felt very warm, and he was walking a little strangely, off-balance, and his shoulder bumped into Fletcher’s pillowy one. 

They were on their way back from a small party, if you could call it that—just their friends and their friends’ friends crammed in someone’s off-campus apartment. There had been a ridiculous amount of pizza and beer and wine coolers and some kind of sweet cocktail that Eliot had made for him. 

Now that he was walking, he could so clearly feel the tightness of it in his belly, the weight of an excess of food and the particular liquid that probably accounted for a percentage of his off-balance-ness. Now that he considered it, that probably also accounted for the slight numbing of the ache that would normally come from such excess. His lips were numb too, and he bit them between his teeth, craving something more. 

The 24-hour convenience store was a neon-bright beacon down the street. He gave into the temptation of it even before he’d finished internally lecturing himself about not spending his hard-earned money on something so absurd. 

“Hey,” he said, stopping Fletcher with a hand on his shoulder. “I wanna pick up a couple things. Meet you back at the room.” 

Fletcher gave Adam a salute and a farewell that he didn’t quite hear because he was already making a beeline across the street. 

His full stomach grumbled as he eyed shelves stocked with tempting, colorful packaging. Reckless with want, he loaded a shopping basket with snacks—stupid, indulgent things with precious little nutrition—off-brand chips and soda and cheese curls and candy bars. And all the while, he thought of sending pictures of his haul to Ronan—one last round of snacks to top off a day of abject gluttony. He wondered if this, _finally,_ would make Ronan crack. 

When Adam got back to his dorm room, he flopped into bed and grazed until Fletcher fell asleep, and then he let himself lean into the pleasure of it—the fullness inside him, how much bigger he felt than even just weeks ago. One tingly-fingered hand roamed over his stomach and the other fed him chips. His belly was so bloated that even mostly laying down, it looked absolutely mountainous. 

Wrappers littered the bed and the floor around him, and just the sight of it made him desirous and needy and shockingly, brutally turned on. He flicked his eyes over to check that Fletcher was still asleep, and then he ripped off his shirt, reclined back into bed and snapped a photo of himself before he could talk himself out of it. 

The shot was dark—lit only by the street lamp outside the window, the screen-saver on Fletcher’s TV, and the bluish glow of his laptop. It was a little blurry. Not his best work, but the low angle made his body look massive, showed off how overfilled his stomach was, and just at the edges of the photo he could see an open bag of chips and a few scattered candy wrappers. 

Heart in his throat, Adam sent the picture to Ronan. It was marked read almost immediately, but there was a long, uncomfortable pause between that and the ellipses that meant he was typing. The ellipses flashed for a long time, too, stopping and starting, before finally Ronan wrote— _Fuck, Parrish. What the hell. Warn a guy._

Adam grinned and typed, _And here I thought you were a man who liked surprises._

 _You can’t just send me shit like that, you’re gonna give me a fucking heart attack,_ and then, _You look so fucking good._

Adam laughed, quiet so he wouldn’t wake Fletcher, but he needn’t have bothered because the sound erupted suddenly into a rumbling burp. He sat up slightly, covering his mouth with his hand to muffle the sound of the inevitable next one. 

Before he could get his senses together enough to type a reply, Ronan beat him to it. He said, _How was the party?_

 _It was nice,_ he typed. It took him a couple of tries to get it right. His fingers kept missing the keys. _Just got back._

_It couldn’t have been that nice if they didn’t have enough snacks to satisfy you, party boy._

Something ignited in Adam’s stomach, fierce and bright and intense. _Oh, they did. There were so many snacks, you have no idea. Drinks, too._

Ronan started typing, and then stopped. It was taking too long, so Adam said, _Really overdid it tonight._

After a moment, Ronan sent, _Looks like you’re still overdoing it to me._

A strangled hiccup lurched out of his throat, as if to punctuate how much he was overdoing it. He shoved a handful of cheese curls into his mouth, and sent back, _Maybe._

_Actually, you were ‘overdoing it’ all fucking day today, weren’t you?_

Ronan hadn’t responded directly to any of the pictures Adam had sent of the food he’d eaten earlier, but Adam was gratified to know that he’d noticed. Of course he’d noticed, Adam didn’t really think it would have slipped past him, but Ronan usually tried so hard not to put too much of himself into text, and Adam didn’t have his body language to read. He couldn’t really know if any of this was landing, if Ronan didn’t say anything. Adam went boneless with something like relief. 

_Was I?_ _Didn’t seem like that much to me._

_In that case, maybe that fundraiser asswipe should’ve warned you about the freshman 40._

Helplessly, Adam imagined it, and felt his stomach swoop, thrilled and nervous at the prospect. _I think 40 will be getting off light at this point._

It was an exaggeration and it wasn’t. Adam already felt the weight he’d gained since Ronan dropped him off, and he wasn’t sure exactly how much it was, but it wasn’t insignificant. If he was up 40 pounds by the end of the school year, he wouldn’t exactly be shocked. 

To drive his point home, he took another picture—Adam propped up against the headboard and his belly spilling decadently onto his thighs. Ordinarily this was when Adam would waffle over his decision, look at the picture and think it wasn’t aesthetically appealing enough or wonder about Ronan’s reaction to the point where he’d end up never sending it at all. But tonight Adam was a little drunk and feeling spurred on by the conversation, and he found himself sending the picture before he had the chance to overthink it. 

_Jesus fuck, Parrish. Do you expect me to just sit here while you send me this shit? I’m losing my damn mind, man._

_You could return the favor if that would make you feel better._

Ronan said, _fuck you._ But a minute later, after Adam emptied his bag of cheese curls, he received a shirtless picture of Ronan. His ridiculously pale chest and stupid farmer’s tan and goddamn perfect musculature. The little he could see of Ronan’s face was flushed scarlet and Adam wanted to press his lips to that heat and he missed Ronan so much it _hurt._

_I love you,_ he typed, unthinking. 

_Christ,_ Ronan said. _Love you too, shithead._

***

Adam was exhausted. Last night he had gone straight from class to his shift at the school library, where he had stayed to finish up some homework and a presentation for his 8am lecture before heading back to his dorm for a solid three hours of sleep. 

It was Friday and he’d just finished up his last class of the day. He was going to go back to his dorm to take a nap just long enough that he’d have time to get dinner when the dining hall opened. Then he would finish an essay that was due next week so he wouldn’t have to worry about it later. 

He shuffled out of the door to the Classics building with the flood of students desperate to go out and enjoy their Friday nights. Adam tried to tamp down the surge of jealousy, and mostly succeeded, but only because he caught sight of something remarkable. 

He had to be hallucinating. He shut his eyes and opened them again, but the BMW was still illegally parked in front of the building with Ronan lounging on the hood, looking unreasonably sexy, wrapped in dark leather and sharp, wicked edges. He was chewing on his bracelets, and maybe, to someone else, this gesture would look just as menacing as the rest of him. To Adam, it betrayed his nerves. 

Adam ran to the BMW, threw himself at Ronan and Ronan stood up just in time to catch him. 

They stayed that way, wrapped in each other, for a long time. 

“You fucker,” Adam said into Ronan’s shoulder. 

“Hello to you, too, asshole.”

Adam forgot about the crowd and kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him, and said, “You could’ve told me you were coming.” 

“I could have, if I wanted to ruin the surprise.”

Adam huffed out a breath that sounded a thousand times more annoyed than he felt. “I could have had work, you can’t just—“

Ronan interrupted him with a kiss and said, “So the fuck what? I’m not stopping you.”

“Well, maybe I want to spend time with you and if you’d asked me like a normal person, I could have coordinated time for this instead of—“

Ronan kissed him again, and he was annoyed but his lips craved Ronan’s and he couldn’t bring himself to pull away. Ronan did and he said, _“Do_ you have work?”

“No, but—“

“Homework?”

Adam sighed. “Nothing I can't put off.”

“Good. I’m heading out Sunday, do it then.”

Adam tried to tamp down the disappointment of having Ronan back for so little time. “You just decided to drive nine hours up the east coast on a whim and you’re only staying for one day?”

“Please. It was seven hours, tops.”

Adam grimaced. “God.”

In the passenger’s seat of the car was a duffel bag full of packets of chips and candy bars and individually wrapped cookies. He heaved it into his lap and sat down. “What the hell, Ronan?” 

“What? Gotta have road trip snacks.” He grinned, reached into an open packet of Cheetos sitting in the cup holder and popped one into his mouth. 

“Uh huh,” Adam said. He had a feeling that Ronan intended to bring the bag up to his dorm room and leave it there. He picked up a protein bar and examined it. 

“Those are Declan’s. You can have them, they taste like ass.” Adam snorted, and wrestled the duffel bag into the backseat. Ronan said, “You hungry?”

Adam had been planning to tend to his empty stomach after his nap, too drained to eat, but Ronan had tapped into a reserve of energy and he _was_ starving. “Yeah,” he said, and took a Cheeto. “You in the mood for pizza?”

“Sounds good.”

Tomorrow Adam would show him one or two of the restaurants he’d found in Cambridge and Boston that were sufficiently cheap and filling and delicious enough for college students on a budget. Tonight they’d go to a pizza joint Fletcher had introduced him to. 

It took awhile to find parking, but finally they rounded the corner and came to a stop in front of the restaurant. Ronan eyed the sign for the pizza buffet with raised eyebrows. “Oh,” he said. 

When his eyes met Adam’s his expression was perfectly neutral, but Adam had a feeling he knew what was underneath it. He tried to keep his own face innocent, too, to keep a smile from stretching at his mouth. Ronan narrowed his eyes. 

Adam pushed open the door and gestured to Ronan. “After you.”

Ronan grunted and pushed his way past Adam with just enough contact that it made the separation afterwards ache, made sitting across from each other criminal. He smelled just like home.

When they got to their booth, Ronan’s ankle came to a rest firmly against Adam’s under the table. It wasn’t enough but it was something. 

Suddenly it felt unbearable that Ronan would be leaving again in less than two days. He tried to fill his voice with enough casual wondering to cover the neediness he felt bubbling up inside him, but he wasn’t sure he quite managed it. He said, “Why are you heading back on Sunday?” 

Ronan fiddled with the edge of the menu. “I don’t know, I feel weird leaving Opal alone for too long.”

“Oh,” Adam said. It wasn’t practical to stay here when he had someone to look after, human child or not. It irritated him anyway, that so many things kept them apart. “Yeah, makes sense.”

“You want me to stay, Parrish?” 

Adam didn’t answer him, was staring down at his menu even though he knew what he wanted. He shrugged and said, “Why don’t you drop her with Declan? Next time, I mean.” He looked up in time to catch Ronan making a face. “What? She loves him.”

The face turned pissy and embarrassed, “That’s the fucking problem.” 

“You’re an idiot, Lynch.”

“Whatever.” He scoffed. “You know how she gets when she can’t go outside, anyway. Alexandria’s not exactly goat-child friendly.” 

“Yeah, I guess not.”

Ronan paused long enough that Adam figured it was the end of the conversation, but then he reached his hand across the table to trace his fingers over Adam’s. He said, “I’ll figure something out. For next time.” 

“I just…” Adam sighed. 

“You miss me,” Ronan said, but it wasn’t mocking. It was awed. 

“God, obviously.” 

He grabbed Adam’s hand tight. “I miss you too, asshole. A real fucking lot.”

He was smiling when he reached for his menu. It was a lovely and genuine expression, and Adam relished the fact that he didn’t need to look at the menu, so he could watch Ronan instead. 

The waiter took their orders. Adam let Ronan go first and he ordered a deep dish pizza monstrosity with what had to be nearly a dozen contrary toppings. It sounded disgusting and expensive, but Adam didn’t complain about it as much as he normally would have, because he knew he would leave the restaurant with a full belly whether Ronan pawned a couple of slices off on him or not. 

Ronan had to have known that Adam would get the pizza buffet, and when he said it, he kept his gaze fixed on Ronan rather than the waiter, gauging his reaction. 

Ronan leaned forward on his elbows, just to get that much closer to Adam. When the waiter left, he said, voice low, “I take it you’re hungry.”

“It’s the most economical choice, Ronan. You know how I eat.” Adam stood and slipped out of the booth. 

He was gnawing at his bracelets by the time Adam returned, but as soon as he saw Adam approaching, his wrist dropped and he sat up straighter in his seat as if to give himself a better view of Adam’s tray.

On it, Adam had generously filled two plates, one piled with a few slices of pizza and one with an assortment of pastas and garlic bread, all bleeding into each other. His Coke waited for him across the table from Ronan, whose own beer looked untouched. 

Adam sat and peeled a hot, cheesy slice from the top of the pile and stuffed it in his mouth. The desire to savor it warred with the impulse to devour it. To make Ronan watch him do it, to see his delicate Irish complexion flush pink. He let himself have a moment to appreciate the slight crunch of the crust with hot, doughy bread just under the surface, the perfect meltiness of the cheese, the mild spice of the pepperoni _—_ a perfect symphony of flavor and texture. And then when he was barely through the first bite, he took another bite, and another, eager. 

Ronan watched him from across the table with blatant interest. After a few minutes, the waiter brought over Ronan’s food and Ronan barely glanced at it, his eyes fixed on the space between Adam’s plate and his mouth. 

Adam polished off his second slice and said, “You gonna eat that or are you just gonna stare at me all night?”

“Can’t I do both?”

“I don’t know, can you?”

Defiantly, Ronan picked up a slice of his own pizza. He ate it like he always did—by inhaling it. In four enormous bites, the piece was gone and another was in his mouth shortly after. It was a pace that Adam had often tried to mimic, but never quite managed. Something about the way Ronan ate had always hit Adam like a sucker punch to the solar plexus. He wondered, idly, how much Ronan would have to eat for him to start to gain weight. Or would he always have this jackrabbit metabolism?

Ronan licked grease off his lips and said, “So is this your new college bro hangout?” He tilted his head at the couple of groups of Harvard kids a few tables away. 

It had a cleaner, more sports bar-like atmosphere than Nino’s had, but somehow Adam always found himself reminded of it when he came here, too. “Not really. I’ve only been here a few times.” Though perhaps a few times was a lot if he’d only been at Harvard for a little over a month. 

“S’good,” Ronan mumbled through a mouthful.

Adam shrugged. The Blue- and Gansey- and Ronan-shaped holes in his life always seemed more acute in the red-green neon light from the restaurant’s sign. He said, “Doesn’t compare to Nino’s.” 

He knew Ronan had understood him because suddenly there was a little sadness in his eyes but he said, “You’re full of shit, Parrish. This pizza’s dope”

It _was_ good _—_ better than Nino’s by a wide margin. “Still.”

Ronan said, “Yeah.”

Ronan was finished by the time Adam had only dented his pasta and still had a whole slice of meat lovers pizza left. 

Adam swallowed and wiped sauce from the edges of his mouth. “I don’t understand how you can eat like that and still be so damn skinny.”

“Yeah, well, I still don’t eat like _you,_ Parrish.”

“I just watched you inhale a whole pizza by yourself, don’t you think that’s kind of a lot?” 

Ronan leaned back and stroked his stomach affectionately. “Well, see, here I am, nice and satisfied by my one pizza, which, by the way, was barely bigger than the personal size. But the thing is, I know you wouldn’t be.”

Adam said, “Oh yeah?” He took a bite. 

“Yeah. You could’ve ordered a pizza for yourself, too, but you went for the fucking _buffet._ So, yeah, I think you’re gonna finish off that tray and then you’re gonna get up and pile it high with pizza again so you can eat even more. Am I right?”

Adam finished chewing and said, “No. I might get more pasta.”

Ronan put his forearms on the table and leaned in closer to Adam. “Oh, of course,” he said. “I stand corrected. Pizza _and_ fucking pasta. I’m sure that’ll help you maintain your figure.”

“You know, I have a feeling it will, considering what my _figure_ looks like.”

Ronan’s eyes darkened suggestively. “Might as well eat up, then.”

So Adam did. With Ronan’s unwavering attention, he finished everything on his tray in record time. He gulped down the last of his Coke and leaned back for a moment, basking in the feeling. 

Despite what Ronan said, four slices of pizza and a plateful of pasta _was_ enough to satisfy him. He was pleasantly, gently full, and if Adam wasn’t so driven towards reckless indulgence, he imagined he would be very satisfied. 

But he was, so he got up from the table and carried his tray back to the buffet. 

True to his word, he took more pasta—the baked ziti had been his favorite, so he piled it on his plate in a cheesy mountain and he shoved on a piece of the Italian sausage lasagna he hadn’t had room for on the last trip. He snagged a few pieces of garlic bread and tossed them on top to soak in the marinara sauce. 

Ordinarily he wouldn’t bypass the salad. He liked to get a variety of nutrients whenever possible, but _—_ He risked a glance back at their table to find Ronan’s eyes already on him and he felt a smug smile twist his expression. 

No, it wasn’t the time for salad. Instead he loaded up with pizza again. Six sinful, greasy slices in every flavor available.

He walked back to the table and when he got there he kicked at Ronan’s leg and said, “Move.”

Ronan slid over after a moment of pause, where he looked like he was debating making this more difficult but decided, in the end, it was worthwhile to have Adam sit next to him. So Adam did, and the booth was small enough that they were very close and he could feel Ronan’s body heat. 

Ronan asked, like he’d already had the question queued up, “Do you eat like this in front of all your college friends?”

He probably expected that Adam didn’t, that he was too embarrassed like he used to be in front of their other friends. But he had to have been wondering. He knew that Adam wasn’t always alone when he sent Ronan pictures of his food. 

Adam said, “Yeah,” and took a bite of margherita pizza—it was refreshing, deceptively light after his last slice. 

Ronan bit into his lip so it was pink and shiny and begging Adam to kiss it. He said, “You do?”

Adam took another bite while he composed his thoughts. He said, “They don’t care. I mean they probably think I’m a damn glutton for it, but—“ He shrugged. 

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“No. I am a damn glutton.” Adam said it like it was a fact, a thought he’d often had, these days, barely worth mentioning. Abruptly, he realized it wasn’t that way for Ronan.

Ronan nodded mutely and looked away, rubbed his palms down his own thighs. He probably wished he had something to do with his hands. He would if they were alone, where Adam could take his hands and put them where he wanted them. Where Ronan so clearly wanted them.

Sometimes Adam forgot the immense power he had over him, at times like this. It burned through him in a heady, intoxicating rush. 

He finished the slice watching Ronan’s face. First, in profile, and then, when Ronan’s eyes inevitably found his again, looking straight at him. 

He catalogued every minute shift in Ronan’s expression as he watched Adam eat. It must have looked strange to someone else, but someone else didn’t matter. What mattered was following the track of Ronan’s eyes—intense, longing, flicking restlessly between Adam’s mouth and his belly and his hands, his plate, his eyes, his throat. 

He ate another slice like that, and then two. It was then that Adam began to feel full—very full. Full enough to feel heavy, for his breath to become shallow, to fill out every available inch of free space in the confines of his vest. 

But not enough to stop. 

Not when he knew he could keep Ronan’s eyes on him for so much longer. When he had more to try and it was so good and he could have as much as he wanted. Adam was practiced enough that he could easily push himself past this point, and he intended to. 

He plowed through the pasta quickly, as he had to devote more attention to looking at what he was doing and less to Ronan. It landed in his stomach like lead. He had to lean back in the booth to remove some of the compression on his belly _—_ had to gasp in a few lungfuls of air. 

Ronan watched him do this and shook his head in disbelief. “Christ. The way you’ve been eating…”

“Hm?” Adam propted, his mouth already full of veggie pizza. 

Ronan said, “It’s fucking unbelievable.”

“Well,” Adam chewed through his bite before saying, “Nice of you to finally notice.” 

“I noticed. You hardly go a fucking _day_ without sending me pictures of what you’ve been eating, of course I fucking noticed.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“I thought you knew that I…” Ronan faltered, looked away from him. “Fuck, Adam, I can’t just _say_ shit like that, okay?”

“Shit like what?”

“Like…” Ronan covered himself with a well-worn mask of indifference and sardonic attitude. “Like, oh hey, Parrish, so glad you’re still eating enough food for three fucking people in the middle of the goddamn day. I bet you look hot as hell crammed into the tight little outfit I know you’re wearing.”

Something swooped in Adam’s stomach, burning him up from the inside. “You can,” he breathed. “Say that.”

“No, I can’t.” 

“You just did.”

Ronan’s eyebrows drew together and his mouth pursed, like he was both surprised and annoyed that Adam was right. 

The waiter came to refill their drinks. Adam could feel some gas burbling in his stomach as he did, but thankfully it took until the waiter had gone back into the kitchen for a belch to come up, sound muffled behind Adam’s lips and the hand he’d brought to his mouth. He leaned back even further and gulped for air, not reaching immediately for another slice. 

There was an inferno behind Ronan’s eyes, heat in his voice, and he said, “Now, don’t tell me you’re getting too full already. Thought you’d get more bang for your buck than that, Parrish. Wasn’t this excursion supposed to be economical?”

Adam opened his mouth to reply and another burp slipped out, thankfully not as loud as the last one would have been. He said, “Excuse me. I fully intend on getting my money’s worth, Ronan.”

“I don’t know. You seem like you’re slowing down.”

Adam took a big bite of pizza and spoke around the mouthful. “I’m not done yet.” In petty revenge, he stole Ronan’s beer when the waiter placed it in front of him and downed it, and his own Coke, along with every single remaining thing on his plate.

When Adam finished and got up for more, Ronan followed him. 

By that point, Adam was full enough that even just walking, just _standing_ felt like a chore—belly grumbling with every movement he made. Those last two slices of pizza had really pushed him over the edge into an uncomfortable sort of fullness, at least when he was on his feet like this. 

If Adam were alone, he might be reconsidering how much to put on his third tray. But he wasn’t alone, and he wanted to show off. Adam smiled at Ronan and Ronan reflected it right back at him, mischievous.

He watched Adam silently for a little while, as he started to fill his plate. Then Ronan reached for a serving spoon and plopped a creamy mess of ravioli onto his plate. Adam watched sauce splatter onto the tray and he leveled Ronan with a look that he hoped would convey, _quit it._

Ronan was still smiling and was not remotely deterred by the look, though Adam was certain he’d understood it. 

He generously allowed Adam to select the next item, though as he reached for some garlic bread, Ronan slipped a couple mozzarella sticks onto his plate. Adam allowed this, but shoved him with his shoulder to show his displeasure. Even so, Ronan remained by Adam’s side, well within shoving distance, and proceeded to get in his way as he was trying to spoon some eggplant parmesan onto his plate, while Ronan reached for the spaghetti. 

He caught Ronan’s wrist, laughter bubbling from his throat, and said, “Jesus, Ronan, You know I don’t like to waste food.”

Ronan flipped over the spoonful and it plopped gracelessly onto Adam’s plate. He said, “I know that, historically, that has not been an issue for you.”

“Well despite evidence to the contrary, I don’t have an iron stomach.” He rested a hand on the crest of his belly and said, “I don’t think I can _—_ ” 

“Sure you can,” Ronan said, with confidence. “But if, for some reason, your appetite fails you, I’ll help you out.” 

“Oh yeah? Thought you were perfectly satisfied, Lynch.” 

“I am. But I think I can make the difficult sacrifice of being _over-satisfied,_ if it means my boyfriend’s stomach won’t explode.” He bit his lip and added, “I just want to see if you can do it.”

“Hmm,” Adam said, instead of confessing that he suddenly, desperately wanted to finish every single bite, just to show him that he could. “I’ll see what I can do.” 

Ronan let him select his pizza without input, but as Adam was about to head back to the booth, a waiter brought out from the kitchen a pizza pie covered in mac and cheese. Ronan grabbed his arm, eyes zeroed in on it, and dragged him over so he could take the first, piping-hot, cheesy slice and drop it on top of Adam’s already heaping plate. 

Adam collapsed into the booth, grateful to be able to rest, again. His waistband was pinching unforgivingly at his hips, belt buckle biting the underside of his belly. He shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable, but he couldn’t. 

He looked around the restaurant. It was that awkward time in between lunch and dinner. The place was busy enough that Adam didn’t feel too exposed, but slow enough that they weren’t crowded. He couldn’t have planned it better if he tried. 

No one was looking at them, and no one was close enough to see Adam reach underneath his gut to discreetly loosen his belt. 

Except Ronan. 

Adam breathed in and then out, testing his belt’s give and enjoying the release of tension. He caught Ronan’s eyes to find them gazing blearily at Adam’s belly. 

“Needed to make room,” Adam said, by way of explanation, and shoveled in a forkful of spaghetti.

Adam felt something brush his side and jumped, but it was just Ronan. His fingers traced the bulge of fat on Adam’s side, the lovehandle that dropped over his waistband and flat-out refused to stay in the confines of his vest. 

Adam took another bite, and another, trying not to be distracted by the sensation. He shivered. Ronan turned more fully to face him, blocking them from sight that much more. He hooked his fingers in Adam’s belt, tugged a little as if to see how tight it was, now. 

Adam shifted. He was getting hard _—_ it was impossible not to. It was almost surprising that he’d lasted for so long, even with just Ronan’s eyes on him. Overeating was usually enough to get him there on its own, if he didn’t’ concentrate on something else. 

And he couldn’t concentrate on something else, not with Ronan here, Ronan touching him, Ronan waiting patiently for him to finish this extravagant meal with abject hunger in his blue eyes. Adam was unraveling. 

He grasped Ronan’s hand and moved it where he wanted it _—_ the taut, swollen side of his stomach. Ronan’s right hand rested on the table, relaxed, a convincing show for anyone who might happen to glance their way. His left tensed and flexed with desperation, feeling whatever he could reach. Adam was already so lit up, the touch was enough to make him arch into it, seeking more. 

Ronan ripped his hand away too soon. Adam made some vague, displeased noise, and he was about to pull him back just as the waiter stepped into his eye-line and walked over to their table. He hadn’t even noticed. If Ronan hadn’t, they would’ve been caught. 

The waiter refilled his Coke and asked if Ronan wanted another beer. Ronan nodded absently, his face flushed scarlet and breath coming in shallow bursts. 

Adam charitably let him have the third beer he’d ordered, instead of taking that one too, but mostly because he thought it would fill him up too much and he wouldn’t be able to lick his plate clean; he wanted to see Ronan’s face when he did. He lifted the slice of mac and cheese pizza to his mouth and took an enormous bite. 

The combination of two indulgent, fattening foods piled together was an incredible turn-on he hadn’t anticipated. It dripped all over his hand and the plate, cheesy and purely decadent _—_ cheese on top of pasta on top of cheese on top of bread.

“How is it?” Ronan said, sounding a little breathless.

Adam chewed through the mouthful, licked his lips clean and said, “Good. Wanna try?”

Ronan nodded, eyes wide and dark. He leaned in as Adam held out the slice to him and took a huge, gooey bite. His eyes closed in pleasure. Adam very suddenly had to rethink the merits of having Ronan help him finish. 

“Fuck, that’s good,” Ronan said with his mouth full. 

Adam held his breath. “Do you want more?”

Ronan swallowed and said, “Nah. I want you to have it.”

_I just want to see if you can do it._

Adam took a Ronan-sized bite, filled his mouth and his stomach with more food than anyone needed. And when he was finished with that, he ate more _—_ more pizza, more ravioli, more everything. 

Part of the way through, Adam had to pause. He hiccupped, groaned pitifully, and hiccupped again. He was sweating _—_ he could feel it drip down his neck and meet his shirt collar. He couldn’t get a full breath of air no matter what he did. 

Ronan was keeping his hands to himself, now, but he was still looking _._ He said, “If we were home I bet I could get you to finish that, easy.”

Adam rolled his eyes and hiccupped again. “If we were home, I wouldn’t have to think about how I’m going to walk to the car after this.”

“I mean, I could…help you.”

 _Impatient._ “I’m not _—_ ” He hiccupped, “—not tagging you in yet, just give me a minute.”

Ronan flexed his shoulders and his arms and his fingers, frustrated and tense. “No, I meant...I could use my hands. Help settle your stomach.”

A smile broke out across Adam’s face. “Generous. I think you’re just lookin’ for an excuse to touch my belly.” He bit his own lip and said, “You don’t need one.” 

He could barely hear Ronan whisper, “I don’t?”

Adam twirled a piece of crust around his fingers, lowered his voice and let Henrietta drip from it as he said, “I want you to. It would help, you’re right. Always does.” 

Ronan’s eyes snapped shut, his face creased in something like pain. His nostrils flared as he took a long inhale, let the breath shoot out from his mouth when he turned his head away. His voice, too, reflected his tenuous grasp on control. He said, “Fuck, Parrish. Don’t say that when I can’t do anything about it.”

He said, “Who says you can’t?” and picked up a piece of pizza, took a big bite and chewed slowly. 

Ronan’s eyes snapped open only to narrow at him. “Parrish, we almost just got caught, are you fucking insane?”

Adam held in his smile just enough not to bare teeth. He took a quick look around the restaurant and said, “So don’t get caught,” before taking another bite.

And then Ronan’s hand was on him, instantaneous, and it sent a sharp, eager thrill all the way to the tips of Adam’s toes. 

The next time the waiter came by, Adam said, “Can we get the check?” 

He wasn’t quick enough to catch the little bit of a hiccup that came out after that. He said, “Pardon me,” and a part of him wanted to avoid the waiter’s eyes and sink into the bench _—_ he could feel heat radiating from his cheeks and his ears. He was so full. Too full to be out in public. Too full to move. 

But he’d learned a trick in dealing with this particular brand of embarrassment. He said, “I must’ve eaten too much. That buffet is dangerous.” 

The waiter laughed lightly and allowed him to play it off, collecting Adam’s stack of empty plates to Ronan’s one. They said, “I’ll bring out the check in just a minute.”

Ronan said, “Oh, are you sure you don’t want anything else, Parrish? Looked like you were eying the dessert.” He made it sound like a legitimate question, but when Adam looked at him, incredulously, he saw a devious twist to his mouth. Ronan knew how far past his limit Adam already was. 

Adam turned to the waiter. “No, thank you, the check will be fine.”

He glared at Ronan until the waiter was far enough out of hearing distance for him to say “Go fuck your—-“ He was interrupted by a burp but continued, undeterred, “Go fuck yourself.”

Ronan was grinning, suspended halfway between mocking and joyous. “I was just making sure. I’ve given up thinking I know how much food is enough for you.”

“Well let me give you a hint,” Adam panted. “That was more than enough.”

“I bet you’ll be singing a different tune an hour from now.”

Adam conceded the point. “That’s an hour from now. Right now I feel like I’m gonna explode if I eat anything else.” 

He braced both hands on the sides of his belly, as if he could keep it from doing just that. And then he noticed the last of his Coke sitting in a perspiring, red cup. It was mostly ice by that point, but he sucked back every drop. 

Ronan said, “Jesus.” He breathed in through his nose, out through his lips. 

He snatched the check when the waiter brought it over, as if Adam was going to fight him for it. He wasn’t. If he’d wanted a separate check, he would’ve asked for one, but he fully intended to let Ronan pay this time. Because even though it was Adam who had brought them there, and Adam who had gotten the pizza buffet, and Adam who had eaten enough to thoroughly incapacitate him while he was still in public, he still blamed Ronan for all of it. 

He closed his eyes for a minute, until Ronan prodded him in the side, slow, like he wanted to savor the feeling of his finger sinking into Adam’s fat. He said, “Are you gonna get up or what, lazy-ass?”

Adam cracked his eyes open and groaned. Ronan was already on his feet. “Can’t.”

“Yes, you can. We just gotta get you home. Then i’m gonna take real good care of you, Parrish.”

“You better. Jesus,” Adam slurred, drowsy and overfull, “I’m so _—_ ” He had to pause, to pant for breath. His stomach was pressing relentlessly against his lungs. “So full.”

“Christ Mary. You fucking look it.”

He looked up into the glow of Ronan’s affection and said, “Yeah?”

Ronan braced one hand on the back of the booth and one on the table to lean in close. The pleather of the seat creaked under Ronan's grip, and he whispered, his voice shaking, “You look…”

Adam couldn’t wait for him to finish. “What?” He slid his hand over the back of Ronan’s. “What do I look like?”

Ronan’s eyes snapped shut. “Adam. I can’t… You _—shit.”_

They were still in public, and it wasn’t fair of Adam to ask Ronan to give voice to the kind of desires he rarely expressed in private, but he wanted it all the same. He’d gotten a taste for it, and it was so like Adam to be too greedy for more. 

So he said, “Okay,” he squeezed Ronan’s hand. “It’s okay. Let’s go.”

Ronan nodded, opened his eyes to flit over his face, and then helped Adam to his feet. 

He hadn’t braced himself properly for the fullness inside him to reach a crescendo when he stood up, and it hit harder than he expected. He let the intensity of the ache overwhelm him and felt his stomach send air burbling up his throat, as if to protest being disturbed. He belched behind closed lips. Adam wished they were back in his room already, but he was nothing if not skilled at enduring discomfort, especially one so strangely pleasurable as this. 

They made it outside into the cold night air, and Adam pressed himself into Ronan’s side, played up the state he was in like he was too full to walk. Ronan obliged him by wrapping an arm underneath his so Adam’s was draped across his shoulders. It made for slow going, swaying into each other the way they were, but Adam didn’t mind. He wouldn’t have been able to handle Ronan’s normal walking pace like this, anyway. 

They had to wait for a crosswalk, and Ronan came to stand in front of him. There was a complicated look on his face, and he reached out to tug Adam’s vest down where it had ridden up. It wouldn’t stay, just kept inching upwards because Adam’s stomach was too full to be tamed by it anymore. 

“Hey,” Adam said, “Thank you.”

A knit formed between Ronan’s brows. “What the hell for?”

“For coming. I really did miss you.”

He leaned in so his forehead was pressed into Adam’s. There were people walking around them. They were missing the light. 

Ronan said, “Me too.”

Ronan parked in visitor parking, shut off the car, and got out to rummage in the backseat, all while Adam still had his eyes shut. His seat was rolled back to give his stomach more room. The combination of the growing darkness and the bizarre lullaby of Ronan’s EDM must have put him to sleep. His body was used to snatching spare moments of rest here and there. 

Ronan said, “Hey, you can head up. I’ll just get my bags and meet you.”

Adam was so full that even moving from the BMW seemed too taxing, but he heaved himself out and tugged the duffel bag from Ronan’s shoulder because like hell was he letting Ronan do it himself while Adam sat on his ass. “You’re my guest. Give me that.” 

Ronan snorted and slammed the car door, another bag in one hand and a backpack slung over his shoulder. “So gentlemanly. Suits your new look.”

“Shut up,” Adam said, suddenly self-conscious for even trying a new look. It was embarrassing to be caught at it. 

Ronan followed Adam into the building and after a moment, said, “I like it, by the way.”

“You do?”

Adam turned his head enough to see Ronan’s face, to determine whether he was fucking with him or being sincere. It was pinkish in the fluorescent light of the lobby. Ronan shrugged. “Don’t fish.”

“I’m just surprised. It’s not really your style.” 

“Whatever. Gonna take some getting used to, I barely fucking recognized you when you came out of class. Thought I was getting attacked by some preppy Harvard douche.”

Adam laughed. He knocked his shoulder into Ronan’s and watched his face struggle against a smile and lose. 

He led them to his dorm and unlocked the door, out of breath from his struggle with the stairs.

They were alone, finally. 

Ronan gravitated toward Adam’s side of the room and threw his bags at the foot of the bed. The last time he’d been here, Adam had only just moved in and his side had been sparse and undecorated. It was barely decorated now, but enough that Ronan spent some time looking. He didn’t smile, not really, but there was a pleased crinkle to his eyes as he trailed his fingers delicately across the knickknacks on the shelf above his bed, the pictures and notes on his cork board, the quilt he’d taken from the Barns that still smelled impossibly like boxwood and mist and moss. It was more lived in, had more personality than the apartment above St. Agnes ever had, and he could tell Ronan approved. 

Ronan said, “That reminds me.” He opened one of the bags and pulled out a bonsai tree sprouting chocolate truffles and placed it on Adam’s bedside table. 

“What the hell is that?” Adam laughed. “I can’t keep that here, man; I have a roommate.”

“So what?” Ronan picked up a tarot card from the deck on his shelf and turned it so Adam could see. Three of cups. “Pretty sure he already knows you’re a fucking witch.”

“I’m not a witch.” Adam snatched the card out of his hand and placed it carefully with the others. “Also, plenty of perfectly unmagical people have tarot cards, Ronan. It’s a hobby.”

“Yeah, a hobby to help you better communicate with an ancient magical forest. Perfectly fucking normal.”

“I don’t generally lead with that in conversations.”

“Whatever, Parrish. Tell him it’s plastic or something. It’s not like it needs to be watered… Probably.”

Adam sidled up next to him and inspected the plant while Ronan watched him. He pulled off a purple sprinkled chocolate truffle and popped it in his mouth. It melted so satisfyingly on his tongue and slid down his throat and, deliriously, he thought he could feel it fill his stomach just that much more. He didn’t have to look to know that his vest was visibly straining to contain him, fabric pulled tight over a belly that was so much larger than Richard Campbell Gansey the Second’s would likely ever be. 

Adam would have to retire it soon. He was too big for it _—_ too big for anything _—_ and something inside him was matching it, growing bigger with every pound. It was going to overflow _—_ spill everywhere. He couldn’t contain it. 

Ronan’s fingers scratched softly against the tweed of his vest, over his stomach. He popped open a button in the very center, let Adam’s belly pool through the gap, and slid his fingertips over the pillowy arch of it, tucking them into the gap between the buttons of his shirt. Ronan was very still and in control, but only just. Adam could feel little tremors in his fingertips, wracked with nervous energy. 

Ronan flicked another button open with the barest pressure from the edge of his thumb. 

Adam drew in a jagged breath and looked down at himself, finding his belly swollen beyond reason—fat and overindulged. A wave of desire rolled through him with such intensity, it was hard to believe he could have ever mistaken this feeling for anything else. 

He looked up and watched Ronan watch him until he couldn’t take it anymore. Until, in a moment of bravery, he smoothed a hand across his stomach—the taut, churning mass of it—and said, “I’ve really gotten big, haven’t I?” Ronan’s eyes widened, almost imperceptibly. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. I know you have.” 

“Adam,” he whispered. 

Adam took one step, then another, towards Ronan, forcing him to back up without touching him at all. “You were right earlier. I’ve been eating like crazy, lately,” he said, voice dark in a way he didn’t quite recognize. “Don’t know what’s gotten into me.”

Ronan’s breath was shallow and quick. “Oh, God.”

The next step had him knocking into Ronan, who looked too stricken to follow Adam’s lead anymore. His stomach pressed into Ronan’s. He said, “You shouldn’t have let me eat so much tonight. I’m just gonna get fatter. Like you said.” 

Ronan scoffed, and his voice came out sharp and gritty as broken glass. _“Let_ you? You seemed perfectly happy to gorge yourself without my help. I just watched you devour God _fucking knows_ how much greasy ass pizza and pasta and bread. If you get even fatter it’ll be all your fault, you fucking glutton.”

Heat licked up Adam’s spine, white-hot and devastating. He swayed into Ronan, gripped the lapels of his jacket in both hands. 

Ronan looked as caught off guard by his own mouth as Adam was, eyes widened in shock and lips open. He sucked in a breath as if to say something, but Adam didn’t want an apology, and he didn’t want a stupid pep talk or any of the bullshit Ronan insisted on giving him whenever he tried this. 

“Not _all_ my fault. You did help,” Adam said. “You always do. Always gettin’ me to eat more than I should.”

“Fuck. I can’t.” Ronan’s eyes fluttered shut, his eyelashes dark against his skin. His voice was wavering and rough. “What are you trying to do to me, huh?”

Adam schooled his expression and his voice with as much innocence as he could muster. He shrugged and said, “Nothin'. Just making conversation.” 

Ronan’s eyes snapped open, blue swallowed by black. “Asshole. You’re trying to get to me. You’ve been doing it all fucking night.”

“Is it working?”

Ronan spun Adam around and pushed him into the door. He pressed them flush together, chest to thigh, and Adam could feel the hard line of him at his hip. He growled, “You tell me, Parrish. Is it fucking working?”

Adam whispered, “Oh, _shit.”_

Ronan’s hands grasped his love handles tight and he said into Adam’s hearing ear, “You’re such a goddamn tease.”

Adam laughed breathlessly. “Does it count as teasing if you follow through?”

“Yes, it fucking does.”

Ronan tilted his head down and kissed him, hard and consuming and messy. Adam wrapped his arms around Ronan’s shoulders, pulled him close, so close that the pressure of him against Adam’s belly was almost too much. It left him lightheaded and desperate and he found himself clawing at the leather of Ronan’s jacket and shoving it, uncoordinated, off his shoulders and onto the floor. 

Ronan’s kisses slowed and then stopped. He rested his forehead against Adam’s, drew in a deep, bracing breath and looked Adam in the eye as he brought his hands around to Adam’s stomach. He opened the remaining buttons on his vest one by one and slid both palms around the bloated mass of it. 

Adam shuddered. He could hear his breath shaking on every exhale and his mouth formed the words, “Oh, thank God.” 

“Jesus,” Ronan said, “Fuck.”

His hands moved in slow, practiced circles for a few moments and Adam felt the overindulgent ache in his stomach ease a little as he did. He burped behind his lips, not quiet enough to hide it from someone who was so close. 

Having his belly rubbed felt so different with Ronan’s eyes boring into his, intense and afraid and determined. It felt different with this tension straining tight between them and the proximity of Ronan’s lips and the lingering aftermath of what they had said. 

Ronan was still looking at him. One of his hands pinched the fat on Adam’s belly as if checking just how much of it there was, and then it slid down, letting the overhang cascade over his fingertips. He jerked his fingers up once, twice, the movement sending ripples over Adam’s flesh. Adam gasped, so he did it again, and again, and every shake sent splinters of heat straight to Adam’s cock. He could feel the mass of food he’d eaten all the way up to his throat. His knees started to buckle. Ronan was murmuring words of praise and cut-off half sentences that were more cursing than not. “ _So fucking good,”_ and “ _Fucking shit Christ, Adam, you’re goddamn incredible,”_ and Adam, very suddenly, wanted to hear him _say it._

He gripped Ronan’s arm to still him for a moment so he could think past the haze. “Ronan,” he said. “I want to know—” the words got caught on his tongue. 

Ronan’s gaze was intent, but kept kneading Adam’s belly fat, like he couldn’t help himself. He whispered, “What do you want to know?”

“I want you to tell me what you like. What you want.”

“I think you know what I want.”

“But I want you to tell me. I want to hear you say it.” Adam pulled him closer. “Tell me you like this. _Please.”_

Ronan‘s eyes shut. He said, “I… Okay. Give me a second. Shit.” He put his lips to Adam’s hearing ear. His voice was uneven, quiet, like he could hardly bear to say it out loud. “I want… I just want to touch you. Your body. God, Adam.” Ronan’s hands grasped at his belly and he felt it all the way to his toes and the tips of his fingers. “You’re so fucking beautiful.”

Ronan drew a shaky breath, like he was about to say something more. It was barely a few seconds, but the moment stretched like taffy. He kissed Adam’s ear and said, “I love you like this.” He trailed a finger down Adam’s bare stomach. “Big.” Adam bit his lip, wanting to keep still and quiet so Ronan could finish. “So fucking soft. I love that you got like this because of me. At least a little.”

A breathless laugh shook out of Adam’s chest. “A lot.”

Ronan drew his head back and grimaced. “I was kind of pushy, huh.” 

Adam tilted his head from side to side as if he was thinking about it. “I don’t know that I would use the word ‘was’ or ‘kind of.’”

Ronan narrowed his eyes into a glare that was significantly less intimidating when he was flushed and clinging to Adam. He said, “Fuck you,” and his hands stopped toying with the overhang of Adam’s belly. “Do you want me to keep going, or not, asshole?”

Adam pulled his face back in and kissed him, embarrassed by his own eagerness but unable to do anything about it. “Yeah, keep—yeah. What else?”

“I…” Ronan closed his eyes again and said, “I like feeding you. Watching you eat. Making sure you have enough. More than enough. As much as you fucking want.” He took a shaky breath, and another, licked his lips. “God fuck, you’ve gotten so big. So _—fat._ Adam, I. I fucking love it.”

Adam shuddered in Ronan’s arms, bit back a noise. He had _known_ it—he had _known_ Ronan wanted this, but hearing it still overwhelmed him. He hadn’t quite realized the depth of how much he needed it. He felt uncontrolled. He cradled Ronan’s skull in both hands and said, “I have. Because of you.”

“Mother fucking Mary.” Ronan’s face was a mess of open emotion, everything stripped bare. “Adam,” he said, “What do _you_ want?”

But Adam didn’t know. He wanted too much. He said, _“Everything.”_

Adam kissed him like a storm raging, like a hurricane, with the force of every feeling he’d tried to suppress or minimize or dismiss. He could finally let go, finally sink into this and never, ever come up for air. He’d learn to live without it, he thought, if he could always have this. 

He lost himself to the heat of it and the slide of Ronan’s tongue against his. Both of Ronan’s hands suddenly grasped the back of his thighs. Ronan grunted and Adam found himself lifted off the floor, his shoulder blades pressed into the door, his legs around Ronan’s waist. 

Adam groaned into Ronan’s mouth. It was a relief to be off his feet, a relief to have heard Ronan say what he’d been wanting to hear for months, a relief to have Ronan here at all, kissing him, every second chipping away more of the ache from having been apart for too damn long. 

Ronan’s arms were shaking and he was breathing hard. He broke the kiss and in a strained voice said, “Goddamn you’re fucking heavy, Parrish.” He lost his grip and Adam’s feet hit the floor. Ronan said, “Shit, sorry.”

Adam laughed, delirious. “That’s what you get for making me so fat, Lynch.” 

Ronan let out a soft, fragile moan, pressed his forehead into Adam’s. He looked wrecked—flushed all over and glassy-eyed. 

“Adam,” Ronan said. He stroked a hand down the center of Adam’s chest to hover over his stomach—his touches suddenly reserved. He said, “Do _you_ like it? All this? You do, don’t you?”

“I—“ Adam took a deep breath. He thought he’d gotten away without having to say it, that getting Ronan to confess would be enough, and he was unreasonably upset that Ronan wanted him to talk about it, too. His face was burning and he fought the urge to try to hide it. He looked up at Ronan, beautiful Ronan, vulnerable and cracked open in front of him. He took a breath and said, “I guess at first… I just knew that _you_ liked it. But…” Ronan’s fingers laced with his and the tension Adam hadn’t realized he was carrying in his shoulders, his neck, eased. “Lately, I’ve been thinking that I maybe, um, definitely kind of like it, too.”

Ronan missed teasing and casual by a mile when he said, “Maybe, definitely, or kind of?”

Adam swallowed. “Definitely.”

“Good. Fucking good.” 

Ronan wrapped his arms around him, grasping at his hips and his love handles and his ass, pulling him away from the wall and towards a destination that was kind of nebulous and abstract in Adam’s mind until Ronan fell back and he fell forward and his mind finally supplied _bed._

He straddled Ronan and kissed him and only broke away when Ronan unbuttoned his shirt and ripped it off his arms and Adam was hit by the chill of the air. When had he lost his vest? He couldn’t remember. He was panting _—_ too loud and too unrestrained.

Ronan was propped up on his elbows, took Adam’s lip between his teeth and sucked on it until Adam made a humiliating noise. He said, “So how long have you known about me?”

Adam smiled against his lips. “A while.”

“How long?”

Adam thought back. He said, “January, when I went back to school and my uniform didn’t fit right, and you—No, December, maybe. Christmas. All that food. And—and the way you touched me.”

“Christ, Parrish, _December?_ ” Ronan sat up, forcing Adam to do the same. “Why didn’t you fucking say anything?”

Adam sighed. “I didn’t _fucking say anything,_ because…” 

There were reasons he could give, for why he’d left this thing between them unsaid: To let Ronan get used to the idea, go at his own pace, keep from scaring him off. To have time to process it, himself, figure out what he wanted, what his limits were. To analyze the data enough that he could convince himself it wasn’t just wishful thinking or reading into things to think that Ronan could want this from him, something that made him feel like this.

But maybe it was just— “I didn’t know what to say. What could I have said? It’s embarrassing. I didn’t know how to explain to you why I was okay with it, why I wanted it, when I couldn’t even justify it to myself.”

“What the fuck is there to justify? You like it, just do it.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “That’s easy for you to say. This isn’t happening to _you._ ”

Ronan paused for a moment before wrapping his arms tight around him, pulling him close. “Alright, shit, Parrish, you want me to get fat, too?”

Adam sputtered, “No, I mean, if you—that’s not what I meant.”

“I’ll do it.”

Adam barked out a sudden, single laugh, breathy and hysterical. “I bet it wouldn’t even bother you. You don’t care what people think.”

“I care what you think.”

“It’s a good thing I like you so damn much, then.” Adam cast a glance down at Ronan’s body—lean and built, his stomach flat, in such blatant contrast to his own—and let the heated, restless thought of it wash over him. “Ronan, you don’t have to… do anything different, just. I don’t like not to be able to fit into things. I feel like people are judging me. Like _I’m_ judging me. And I can’t afford to keep buying too much food and new clothes all the time. I’m wasting so much money, on—on what? 

“Pleasure?” 

“Yes. That’s… that’s what I have to justify. If it’s worth all of this, just for something that feels good.”

“Look, Adam, you don’t have to keep doing this. We can slow down, or you can lose weight.” His fingertips combed through Adam’s hair. “Whatever you want, okay?” 

Adam frowned. “Okay.”

“But if you want this. Look, I know it sucks, okay? But fuck, you don’t—you don’t need to worry about it. It’s fucking fine. You’re gonna get some fancy fucking degree and some fancy fucking job and you’re gonna make bank and you’re not gonna have to worry about any of that shit. You can buy new clothes, and eat whatever you want, and if some shit-dick has a problem, they can shove it up their ass.”

Adam huffed a laugh. It wasn’t enough to ease his mind, and they both knew it, but it was nice to have a vision of the future—a future where they were together, where they could have this. 

Ronan whispered, “I could dream all of that for you, too, right now. Whatever you want. Shit. I would give you anything. Everything.”

He had to know that was out of the question, but Adam nodded. “I know.”

“I fucking like giving you things.”

Since it was a night for truth, Adam decided to admit to another one that he’d been guarding for a long time. “Sometimes I like when you give me things.”

Ronan’s lips parted in shock. “You do?”

“Especially if it’s food.”

A smug, insufferable smirk tugged at the corners of Ronan’s mouth. _“Really?”_

“Shut up. God, yes, really.”

The expression faltered, overpowered by instant, helpless desire. Ronan said, _“Fuck me._ That’s really fucking. Hot, actually. Shit.”

Adam laughed, grin stretching his face. He trailed his fingertips over Ronan’s cheekbones and down to his jaw. He said, “But I don’t want to have to depend on you for things like this.” 

“Okay. We’ll figure it out, Adam.”

“Yeah.”

Adam was tired of rationalizing and maybe Ronan could read that off of him, too, because his eyes fell in a luxurious once-over and he let one of his hands rest on the dramatic curve of Adam’s belly again. 

He said, “You look bigger than I remember.”

Adam squirmed in Ronan’s lap. He wasn’t sure if he really was that much bigger or it only felt like it. He hadn’t weighed himself. It had only been a few weeks since he had left, and he felt sure that, despite evidence to the contrary, he wasn’t so gluttonous that he could have gained enough to be visible in such a short amount of time. 

He said, “You think so?”

“Yeah I fucking think so.” Ronan’s fingers pinched at one of the small rolls between his chest and his belly, the ones that Adam could admit he didn’t remember having over the summer, either, and though they were shallower and less obvious when he was full like this, it was still apparently enough for Ronan to see. Ronan wiggled it, pointedly, and it made the rest of him shake in waves for a moment after. He said, “This is new.”

Adam moaned, and was momentarily mortified that it was followed by a deep, full-sounding burp. But this was Ronan, and Ronan liked this, Ronan wanted it, and so he let another burp slip out, chasing an easing of the pressure he could still feel pressing against his lungs. But he still said, “Excuse me.”

In a trembling voice Ronan said, “You must be so fucking full, after all that.”

“Stuffed.” Adam bit back a smile. “Couldn’t eat another bite.”

“Now, we both know that’s not true.”

Adam laughed. “Maybe not. But I am—“ he was interrupted by a weak, overstuffed burp “—I am really full.”

“I’ll fuckin’ bet,” Ronan said. “Such a show-off.” He kept rubbing Adam’s belly, and it had an aggressive edge to it, as if he was finally letting himself lean into this in the same way Adam was. 

Then Ronan looked away. He licked his lips and took a deep breath that cracked and sputtered on the way in. His eyes found Adam’s again and he said, “When did you know? That you wanted this.”

“I don’t know,” Adam admitted. “I think maybe I've always wanted it.”

“But when did you know?”

Adam shifted his hips until his ass was fully in Ronan’s lap. Ronan choked on air and looked up at him with unfocused wonder in his eyes, like Adam had made him forget what he’d just asked along with every coherent thought he’d ever had. 

He could answer quickly so that they could get back to it. His body was clambering for more—he was so hard he nearly couldn’t stand it and his lips were tingling with the want of Ronan’s. But Ronan deserved to know everything, so Adam said, “When I first got here, after you drove back to the Barns… I went to the cafeteria and it was just—limitless. It’s buffet-style, you know? The first night you weren’t here, I ate a whole tray of food—more than enough. But I got seconds, anyway. Not as much as tonight, but. I ate until I was stuffed, and it felt—fuck. I wanted to text you, to tell you what I was doing, but I didn’t, and it still felt—it felt…”

Ronan’s voice was chaotic. “How did it feel?” 

“Really fucking good. I was so heavy and—” Adam licked his lips. “God, I was so damn full.”

Ronan’s hands framed his stomach and squeezed. “Full like this?” 

Adam sucked in a breath. “Yeah, like this. But… by the time I got back here I already wanted more.”

“So, wait a minute. You only realized you really wanted this after I fucked off? Way to make a guy feel special.”

Adam sighed. “It was because... I wanted to eat even when you weren’t trying to feed me. Even when you weren’t there to appreciate it. Even when I couldn’t tell you. I wanted to keep going, anyway. That’s when I realized.”

“Jesus, God, Adam. You should’ve fucking told me. Fuck. You asshole. I fucking _knew it.”_

Adam sat up straighter. “What?”

“I knew you had to be into this. There was no way—no fucking way you weren’t, with the way you acted.”

“You _knew?”_

“Yeah, you think I would’ve bothered with half this shit if I didn’t think you even _liked_ it?”

Adam shoved at Ronan’s shoulder ineffectually. “How did you—“

Ronan laughed at him. _“How?_ You are _so_ obvious.”

“Like hell, you’re the one who—“

“We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you.”

Adam huffed. “Well what _about_ me? What was so obvious that you knew even before _I_ did?”

Ronan rolled his eyes and reached out to trace circles around Adam’s navel with his thumb. “Okay, well, for one thing, you fucking melt when I touch you… right here.” He squeezed Adam’s belly fat and Adam’s body responded immediately, forcefully, pushing into Ronan’s hand. 

He said, “It’s… just sensitive, Ronan. It’s an erogenous zone. That doesn’t mean anything.”

Adam didn’t know why he was arguing, when no matter how he’d drawn his conclusions, they both knew Ronan was right.

Ronan snorted in disbelief. “Except it totally fucking does. You love when I play with it, especially—especially after you’ve eaten. Especially when you’re _stuffed.”_

To punctuate his point, he framed Adam’s overfed stomach with both hands and massaged on either side. All the breath left Adam’s lungs at once so he had to gasp for it before he could say anything. “I…”

“It turns you on, doesn’t it? Shit, every time you overeat you can’t fucking jump me fast enough. Of course it does. It doesn’t take a genius like you to figure that one out.”

Frustrated, needy, Adam’s hips shifted, seeking friction. He bit out, “Well, did you ever stop to think that maybe I was just turned on because _you_ were?”

“Of course I did, I’m not an idiot. But that wasn’t it, was it?” Ronan smacked his hand, open-palmed against Adam’s belly, not hard enough to sting, but hard enough that it sent quakes of motion through every fat, doughy part on Adam’s body. 

His eyes shut tight and a whine slipped out before he could even think about stopping it. He said, “No.”

Ronan’s voice dropped low. He leaned closer and said, “You were turned on because you like it.” He grabbed Adam’s belly and shook. “Such a fucking glutton. You _like_ eating so much you can’t move. Can’t fucking breathe.”

 _Yes,_ he thought, _I love it._ But he couldn’t make the words come out. Instead, he spat, “So why the hell didn’t _you_ say anything if you knew this whole time?”

Ronan’s eyes dropped down for a moment, embarrassed. “I didn’t know the whole time. A few months maybe. But you were all over the fucking place. Like, one minute you’re all insecure and the next you’re a cocky fucking asshole. I didn’t know what the hell to think. I was trying to let you come to terms with it, or whatever.”

“I was trying to let _you_ come to terms with it! God, you’re such a hypocrite.”

“Oh, fuck you. See if I ever try to be considerate of your feelings again.”

Adam tried to keep the smile off his face. He said, “Oh, was that what you were doing?”

Ronan’s eyes narrowed and he tilted his head condescendingly. “Yes, Parrish, that’s what I was doing.”

“So you weren’t just being a total chickenshit, then?” 

Ronan sputtered and drew in a few harsh breaths, his nostrils flaring with something that would have looked like anger to someone who didn’t know him. Finally, he said, “Every time you brought it up, it sounded like you felt shitty about it. ” 

Adam softened, melted. “Sometimes, yeah, I guess I did. I do, but.” He wrapped his arms around Ronan’s neck and said, “I liked it, too. All the time.” 

Ronan met his eyes hesitantly. “You liked feeling shitty?”

Adam huffed. “No, I liked—” The words caught in his throat. He thought maybe they’d never come out, that he wouldn’t be able to say it, after all. It was too much. But then the words started tumbling out and he couldn’t stop them. He said, “I liked… feeling taken care of. I liked that when I was with you I could let go and have as much as I wanted. Sometimes I feel like I do nothing but want, but this—this I get to have.”

Ronan nodded, emphatic, wrapped his arms around Adam’s waist and brought him in close. Adam said, “And it feels—it feels so good, Ronan. That… fullness. I always want _more,_ and you keep giving it to me, and it's making me so, so fat. I can’t believe how fat I’ve gotten. How fat I’m _getting,_ because—shit, Ronan. I don’t want to stop. I just want to _eat_ and sometimes I don’t even care how big I get because of it. Sometimes I think I like that part just as much. Sometimes I imagine…”

“What?”

“Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to get even fatter. Sometimes I want to.”

 _“Adam,”_ Ronan sighed.

“Do you want that?”

“Yes, Jesus Mary fuck, of course I—“ 

Adam kissed him because he couldn’t stop himself, not with Ronan looking at him like that. His mouth was hungry and blistering hot and his hands grasped at Adam’s hips, finding soft handholds, and his hips started grinding against him. 

Ronan broke away with a gasp and whispered raggedly into his ear, “So if I’m a chickenshit, what’s that make you?”

“Chickenshit,” Adam admitted. He pushed Ronan down until his back bounced against the mattress. “Takes one to know one.” 

Adam draped his body over Ronan’s and Ronan let out a strangled, _“Fuck.”_

He took a couple of shallow breaths and dragged his hands up and down Adam’s back. “Tell me what you want me to do to you, Adam.” 

“I…” He looked down at Ronan’s red, parted lips, and thought about what they had felt like on his belly, the slick heat of his tongue. He heard himself say, his voice dark, “I want your mouth.” 

Ronan writhed underneath him, grasped at his thighs. “Okay, yeah. I want to. Let me.” It was phrased like an order, but sounded like begging. 

Adam felt so completely like the way he’d felt that day in Cabeswater, his body humming with power and life, and before he had even thought it consciously, vines sprouted from his headboard. Ronan jumped when he felt them, turned his head to look and said, “Oh, fuck.” 

The vines crept towards Ronan’s hands. “This okay?” Adam asked. 

“Yeah, _fuck yeah.”_

Adam thought about Ronan’s wrists bound and watched it happen before his eyes, watched the vines wind around his arms and pull them above his head, watched Ronan’s chest heave with shallow, rapid breaths. 

Adam crawled up, braced his knees under Ronan’s arms and let his stomach hang in Ronan’s face, suspended not an inch from it. There was a painful fraction of a second where silence echoed in Adam’s room. He couldn’t see Ronan’s face, couldn’t feel the way his hands told truths that his mouth rarely did. But then—a noise, high-pitched and desperate, and Ronan was surging up into him, hands straining at the vines and tongue hot against his skin. 

Adam’s body shuddered and collapsed. He caught himself on the headboard and moaned, feeling suddenly, utterly helpless regardless of the fact that he had Ronan tied up beneath him, Adam’s belly smothering his face. 

Ronan’s mouth unmoored him. He could barely breathe, could barely think. His tongue dove into Adam’s navel, eating him out, licking him open _—_ greedy, insatiable. “Ronan,” Adam heard himself cry, “Ronan!”

Ronan tilted his face to the side to drag in a few precious lungfuls of air, but Adam wasn’t able to gather his wits about him before he dove back in to suck Adam’s belly fat into his terrible, clever mouth, lave it with his tongue and lips and little pinprick-scrapes of sharp teeth. 

His stomach groaned, overfull and annoyed at being jostled around in such a delicate state, but Adam didn’t care. Or, rather, he did, and he wanted it exactly like this—the relentless pressure of it threatened to overwhelm him, and it was far too much, and Adam wanted _more,_ always more. 

Ronan bit him, just this side of gentle, and Adam sucked in a gasp of air, shuddering and crumbling as Ronan pressed his lips over his teeth marks in wet, contrite kisses. He bit Adam again, harder this time, exploratory, like Ronan just enjoyed the feeling of Adam’s plump flesh between his teeth. 

Adam let out some kind of raw, wild sound. It was going to leave marks, he realized, hickeys emblazoned into his skin, love bites to keep with him days after Ronan leaves, to remind him of this moment—of Ronan’s hands curled into white-knuckled fists and tied to his headboard while he gave Adam everything he wanted, everything he’d been craving for longer than he knew. 

He sat back to let Ronan breathe without being suffocated and unwound the vines from Ronan’s wrists so Adam could uncurl his fingers and slot his own between them. 

He said, “You’re a fucking vampire.”

There was an unhinged grin pulling at Ronan’s flushed face. “Sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry in the slightest. 

Adam bit at his jawline and worked his mouth down to his neck. Into the hollow of Ronan’s throat, Adam said, “If you’re gonna treat me like your chew toy, I’m gonna treat you like mine.”

Ronan threaded his fingers through Adam’s hair and sighed in a way that told Adam he didn’t exactly mind. He said, “Oh, well, I guess fair’s fair.”

Adam laughed and reached down to unzip Ronan’s jeans, pull them down his hips, and when he leaned in to kiss him again, he could feel Ronan’s erection drag across his lower belly. 

Ronan gasped, choked on air. “Shit.”

“Oh, you like that?” Adam spread his thighs apart to get lower, let his belly hang down between them, press gently into Ronan’s cock. 

“Jesus fuck, Adam.” He held Adam’s hair in a vice grip that sent tingles all the way down his spine and then he said, “Ah, wait.”

Adam looked up at him to find his other arm thrown over his eyes, a pained grimace flashing perfect white teeth. Adam balanced himself back on his hands and knees. “What?”

“Just… give me a sec,” Ronan panted. “I was gonna…”

“Wow, already?” Adam had barely touched him. He grinned, self-satisfied. 

The arm across Ronan’s face fell down to the mattress, dramatically. His eyes narrowed and he said, “The fuck do you mean, _already?_ You’ve been teasing my sorry ass all night, fuck yeah I was gonna come as soon as you fucking touched me. Prick.”

“So come,” Adam said. 

He crawled backwards, pulled Ronan’s underwear down, wrapped his lips around the head of Ronan’s cock and slid down until it almost hit his throat. 

Ronan jerked under him, his legs kicking out at the sheets, his mouth forming garbled words that Adam couldn’t decipher. He held Ronan down at the hips and took him into his mouth again and again. He licked and sucked at the head of Ronan’s cock to pull those beautiful, broken sounds out of his mouth. Ronan wasn’t trying to hold back anymore, because he never could deny Adam anything. 

“Adam, ah, fuck, I’m—“ Ronan shuddered violently, came all over Adam’s lips and his own stomach. 

Adam was grinding against the mattress, too worked up to care that his belly was aching fiercely from it. He licked at Ronan’s stomach and felt it jump under his tongue. 

While he waited for Ronan to recover, his thoughts drifted dizzily to what this might feel like in reverse, if there were more plushness against Adam’s lips and less muscle. He took what flesh there was underneath Ronan’s belly button and sucked his own kiss there until Ronan whimpered in pain, or pleasure, or both. 

“Adam, come up here so I can—“ Adam licked a stripe up his belly and Ronan’s breath caught. 

“Mm,” Adam conceded. He kissed his way up Ronan’s chest and his neck and up to his slack, overheated lips, straddling him again.

“You know, Parrish,” Ronan said, dragging his fingers appreciatively over Adam’s chest and the round, firm bulge of his swollen stomach “I might need to step up my game. College is making you fatter than I am.”

Adam huffed in disbelief. “I think your game is plenty strong enough, Ronan, how fat do you want me to get, exactly?”

Ronan bit his lip. He could have laughed it off, but instead Adam could see the way the idea of it caught, how it made his eyes go heavy-lidded and dark. Ronan didn’t answer right away. He rubbed the palms of his hands into the sides of Adam’s belly and stared, admiring for a long moment, watching Adam shift impatiently in his lap. 

Finally, he whispered, “I wanna fucking… spoil you. Make sure you never want for anything. I want you to eat as much as you want, whenever you want, and however fat that makes you, that’s how fat I want you to get.”

“Oh,” Adam breathed, “Holy shit.”

Ronan smacked his belly playfully. “Sky’s the limit, big boy.”

Adam sputtered out a laugh. He was so hard he was throbbing in the confines of his unforgiving, entirely-too-tight slacks. “Big boy?”

“You don’t like it?” Ronan reached under the hang of his belly to find the clasp of his belt and rip it open. “I think it’s fitting.”

“I—“ Adam stalled. _Big boy._ It was _embarrassing._ “I don’t hate it.”

Ronan’s smile said he was out for blood. He yanked the sides of Adam’s slacks together so he could unbutton them, unzip, stick his hand in Adam’s boxers to wrap one enormous hand around the length of him. 

Adam groaned, fell forward and caught himself on Ronan’s chest. 

Ronan said, “Good, you better get used to it, big boy, you ain’t getting any smaller.” 

“You don’t know that,” Adam said, just to be contrary. 

Ronan’s hand was ruthless. “Mm, I’m not gonna hold my breath. Not with the way you eat. Jesus.” Ronan grabbed a handful of his belly and shook. “Sometimes I can’t fucking believe how much you can put away. It’s unreal.”

Adam groaned, “Me either. Shit, I’m so full.”

“All that fucking pizza.” Ronan stared as if he could see exactly where every last bite had gone. “And I bet you’ll be hungry again soon, won’t you? Always so greedy for dessert, I know you could make room.” 

“Probably,” Adam said. He let both of Ronan’s hands undo him, hurtling hum towards the edge. “The way you looked at me. _Oh,_ Ronan, I would eat so much to make you look at me like that.”

Ronan looked at Adam, now, in exactly the same way _—_ so blatantly adoring that Adam could hardly stand it but couldn’t take his eyes off it. Wouldn’t dare risk missing it for even a second. 

And then Ronan said, “You would eat so much whether I looked at you or not, you glutton. This past month’s proven that.” He hooked his thumb in Adam’s belly button and grabbed the hang of his gut. He hissed, “Look at you, you’ve gotten so fucking fat.”

Adam shuddered. _“Oh._ You’ve _—_ you’ve created a monster, what can I say?”

Ronan looked incredibly pleased with himself and said, “God, I have, haven’t I?”

Adam found himself thinking of how he could use this monstrousness to torture Ronan on their day spent together. He said, “Tomorrow I want to take you to this Tex-Mex place in Allston. They have _—ah—_ the most ridiculous portions. The enchiladas are _—_ ” Adam shut his eyes, licked his lips like he could taste them now if he imagined hard enough. _“Unbelievable.”_

“Jesus God.” Ronan dropped his face to try to stifle giggles into the crook of Adam’s neck and it didn’t work because Adam could still feel him vibrating. “Are you already fantasizing about more food?”

Adam said, “No,” because Ronan’s hand was still sliding smooth and tight over his cock while the other shook his stuffed belly and he couldn’t think of a decent rebuttal. He couldn’t think of anything except how good it felt, about Ronan, about—

Ronan was right, of course. It was infuriating. Adam was thinking about those enchiladas. He was helpless against it _—_ completely unable to stop himself from fantasizing about chips dipped in queso and fried ice cream and strawberry margaritas and burritos and churros, and, and _—_

Ronan said, “You want it _now,_ don’t you? You greedy fucker.”

“Please,” Adam whined. 

Ronan laughed at him, bright and elated. He said, _“Crassus,”_ and then Adam came with Ronan’s name on his lips and his toothy smile against his throat, shaking wildly, and finally, finally letting the pleasure of it wash over him. 

He collapsed on top of Ronan because there was nowhere else to go in his tiny twin bed. Ronan accepted this with an _oof,_ and tightened his arms around Adam’s waist. 

Ronan tolerated this for several minutes as Adam drifted in hazy post-orgasm sleepiness, but eventually he turned Adam onto his side so he was slotted snugly between Ronan and the wall. 

Ronan got up and Adam floated in and out of consciousness to the familiar tune of Ronan’s restlessness and annoyed grumbling. He heard snatches of water running, bags unzipping, clothes rustling. He caught him saying, “So high maintenance, you’re lucky I came prepared for your greedy ass,” right before he dropped something onto Adam’s stomach. 

Adam groaned and peeled open his eyes to find two king size candy bars had fallen off the round peak of his stomach and onto the bed next to him. He picked one up without thinking about it, without complaint, ripped off the packaging and took a huge, gooey, chocolatey bite. 

Ronan snatched the ends of his pant legs and ripped them off, and then his boxers, pried the bed-sheets out from underneath Adam and draped them over him. 

He slipped in beside Adam and pillowed his head on his chest so his face was pressed into the crest of Adam’s bloated stomach. Soon, he was asleep, or pretending to sleep, so Adam mindlessly ate both candy bars, dizzy with indulgence, over-satisfied and aching deliciously. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (bad) Latin translations:
> 
>  _Vivere ut edas:_ live to eat—from a Cicero quote “esse oportet ut vivas, non vivere ut edas” meaning “you should eat to live; not live to eat.” DISAGREE
> 
>  _Crassus_ : fat man (at least, to the best of my google translate ability)
> 
> Come find me [@Chubstilinski](chubstilinski.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


	3. Epilogue

Ronan was sprawled dramatically across the Barns’ living room sofa, his legs warm where they were occupying Adam’s lap. He was breathing heavy, because he had foolishly tried to keep pace with Adam during dinner, and now he was paying the price. 

The dinner had been Adam’s doing. He’d been practicing back at school _—_ just cheap, easy food made with Fletcher’s illegal microwave and hotplate. It was a valuable skill to have for someone like him, and he was determined to be good at it, which meant that he would be. It had increased his options by a wide margin _—_ made it easier and more convenient to eat outside of the time-constraints imposed by the dining halls, if he was up late studying or got a sudden, unquenchable desire for a midnight snack more substantial than chips. 

So Adam cooked a meal for the two of them, while Ronan sat on the kitchen island and gave him advice that veered frequently into heckling. Adam had made plenty _—_ enough, he thought, for his own and Ronan’s combined appetites plus maybe leftovers for lunch tomorrow if Adam could manage not to completely gorge himself. 

But to Adam’s surprise, Ronan paced him. Or, he tried to, but he always ate so much faster than Adam, and he wasn’t nearly as practiced, so he still stopped well before Adam had, looking dazed with overindulgence, glassy-eyed and breathless. 

Adam was full, too, but pleasantly so _—_ warm and sated, with just enough ache to really feel it. 

Ronan was _stuffed._ Adam could tell. He rarely had the pleasure of seeing Ronan in such a state _—_ he was a garbage disposal normally, but in the way a lot of teenage boys were. Not like this. 

His stomach was swollen into a delicate arch, dwarfed entirely by Adam’s, of course, but lovely all the same. 

Ronan’s eyes were shut, so Adam was free, for the moment, to take in the sight of him. He wasn’t sure that Ronan had noticed, yet, but it wasn’t just tonight’s meal that had rounded out his stomach. Because Ronan’s body was layered, now, with the slightest, barest hint of softness. 

Adam had the feeling it was only noticeable to him, because Ronan wasn’t nearly as fixated on his own body as he was. Next to Adam’s weight gain, it should barely register, but Adam had spent a considerable amount of time cataloguing Ronan’s every feature in excruciating detail, and so, he noticed. 

When he’d gotten home for winter break, Adam had been excited to show off the little bit of weight he’d managed to put on in the sliver of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It looked substantial piled on top of the several pounds added between Ronan’s last visit and Thanksgiving break. It was enough that he was sure he was going to have to make a trip to the Goodwill for new clothes before he returned to school. The thought of it didn’t bother him as much as it once would have, as it came with a strange sense of satisfaction, of accomplishment. 

But then Ronan had kissed him senseless as soon as he’d gotten out of the car. That was when Adam had finally gotten his hands on him again _—_ and that was when he knew. Because he realized all at once, when he’d gotten his hands underneath all of Ronan’s layers, that he couldn’t feel the individual dips of Ronan’s ribs beneath his palms, his hips were no longer bony, and he knew that if he brought his hand around to Ronan’s midsection, he wouldn’t find abs, not even if Ronan flexed them. 

Adam had been home for two days, and had so far managed to restrain himself from pointing it out, but it was on the tip of his tongue more often than not. He was a little obsessed, he knew, and he was pretty sure that Ronan had caught him looking. Did he know what Adam thought of him? Could he guess at the content of every cut-off fantasy Adam hadn’t given himself permission to enjoy? 

Ronan cracked his eyes open and found Adam’s instantaneously, like he could sense them roving wildly over his body, like _he_ was the psychic _—_ worse, a mind-reader. But it was probably just that Ronan knew him well enough to predict his behavior, and Adam had been doing an awful lot of staring lately. 

“Christ,” Ronan said. His voice was strained. “I haven’t been this full since Thanksgiving. You eat too much, anyone ever tell you that?”

Ronan nudged Adam’s stomach with his knee and Adam very nearly gave into the impulse to pat Ronan’s belly in return, teasing. Instead he inched the tips of his fingers up under the hem of the shirt that wasn’t quite meeting the waistband of his jeans. He said, “Once or twice. No one asked you to try and keep up with me, Lynch.”

“What am I supposed to do with so much fucking food around all the time, then, let you eat all of it?” 

He didn’t point out that Ronan had always seemed perfectly happy to do just that. Before Adam could formulate a response that wasn’t desperate and obvious, Ronan burped unapologetically, and then rubbed his stomach, one-handed, lazy. He said, “You’re gonna make me get fat, too, at this rate.”

A shameful sort of heat sliced through him, twisting his insides with equal parts guilt and unfathomable desire. And if you asked Adam, Ronan was already starting to get fat. He’d already put on _—_ fifteen, twenty? _—_ pounds since the summer, probably. Adam could see exactly where this trajectory would lead, because it was the same place it had led Adam. 

Would Ronan want that? Would he like it, the same way Adam did? 

Adam’s heart was thumping loud and fast in his chest. He bit his lip between his teeth. He said, “I wouldn’t…” 

Ronan struggled to prop himself up on his elbows to look more squarely into Adam’s face. “You wouldn’t what?”

This shouldn’t have been so hard. He had gone through the exact same conversation in reverse. “It’s nothing, just…” 

“Sure, Parrish. You’re red as fuck and can’t seem to get a full sentence out, but I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Adam spat, “I wouldn’t _mind,_ that’s all.”

Ronan’s expression was very cool, and very even. He said, “You wouldn’t mind me... getting fat?”

Adam shrugged. He tried to hold Ronan’s eyes and not show how embarrassed he felt. He couldn’t tell what Ronan was thinking. 

And then Ronan said, his tone mocking and over-exaggerated, “That so? Why, I never would have guessed.”

Adam shoved Ronan’s legs off him. He pointed an accusatory finger and said, “You knew.”

Ronan grinned, devil-may-care, devastating, obnoxious. He brought both hands up to pillow his head when he leaned back against the arm of the couch. “Yeah, duh. You’re so obvious. I keep telling you that.”

“You did this on purpose. God, I hate you.”

“Nah, you don’t.” 

He didn’t. He loved him. Adam loved him and he had done this on purpose, for Adam, before he had really even known that he wanted it. 

Adam raised himself up on his hands and knees, crawled over Ronan so he could kiss him. So he could palm Ronan’s belly the way he’d been dying to do and said, “You’ve been driving me goddamn crazy.”

Ronan snickered. Adam could feel it in his stomach. It didn’t jiggle _—_ Ronan was way too full for that. “Oh, how the tables have turned.”

Adam didn’t think that was fair. “Come on, I never messed with you like that.”

“That is hilarious coming from the guy who told me he ran ‘experiments’ on me to catalogue what turned me on.”

“That’s a mischaracterization _—_ ”

“ _—_ Like I’m a fuckin’ lab rat.” 

“Fine!” Adam threw his hands up, sat back on his knees. “I guess we’re even.”

“Not yet, we’re not.” Ronan looked over Adam’s body and then his own. He sat up and ran his hands over Adam’s sides, fingers catching in generous rolls. “Seems to me like I got a _lot_ of catching up to do.” 

Breathless, Adam said, “You think you can catch me? I’d like to see you try.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet you would, you perv.”

He was enjoying himself too much, so Adam leaned down to kiss the smug expression off his face. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE HAVE FINALLY REACHED THE END. WHY DID THIS FIC TAKE ME LITERAL YEARS. I hope it was worth it and you guys enjoyed lmao <3
> 
> Come find me @chubstilinski on tumblr for more nonsense

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you’re all enjoying this mess so far! Chapter 2 is underway~
> 
> If you like chubby raven cycles pls come follow me on [tumblr](chubstilinski.tumblr.com)!!


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